> The ship's designer was Hein Jakobsson, the same master shipbuilder who completed Vasa. He realized that Vasa had the wrong proportions even before she was launched, which could lead to instability.
And indeed, she tipped, foundered and sank on her maiden voyage.
> The Apple was therefore built wider than the Vasa, but despite this, the ship was not successful...
Being a "master shipbuilder" in those days was apparently a tough gig.
This is one of the things that reading D.K. Brown's pentology on design of RN ships (_Before the Ironclad_, _Warrior to Dreadnought_, _Grand Fleet_, _Nelson to Vanguard_, and _Rebuilding the Royal Navy_) drives home: in the pre-WWI era almost everything is done with fudge factors and building off of what was done before, but a little different, and even into the 1950's there are lots of room for error.
One story that has stuck with me is of a destroyer class in WW2 that performed particularly horribly because of an error on calculating the metacentric height. The proper procedure for calculating it was to have two different dudes each spend a week calculating it independently and hoping that their numbers matched. Apparently, in the rush of what had to be done, the RCNC cut some corners and only had one draftsman do it in this case, and he made an error and now the ships rolled horrifically. But even Bouguer and Euler- the people inventing metacentric height calculations- are working a century after the Vasa, so a master shipbuilder in that era just has his working experience and no real math to help him.
If you follow the excellent YouTube channel Drachinifel you will learn that many ships of that era (including WW2) had design flaws, like heavy rolling, flooding into compartments, breaking of the hull etc. This was the time before computer models and computer simulation.
Hein Jakobsson completed Vasa, but wasn't the original designer. That was Henrik Hybertsson. Jakobsson widened Vasa somewhat to try to improve it, and Äpplet was even wider.
Äpplet was in use for almost 30 years, and was deliberately sunk.
Don't link to mobile wikipedia. It is incredibly rude to people who want the normal site, while being of zero benefit to people who want the mobile site.
I aspire to a life where my scale of rude behavior tops out with a stranger using the mobile version of an interesting link on an online message board.
it annoys me a lot, but I don't blame it on the people posting, but on the people who put a one way trap door in the code on the site
that's on top of my annoyance with the huge number of people who didn't understand what was good about original html markup and set about adding pixel counts and thinking they needed to know the screen size etc. It's the same people who don't understand unix.
Seriously, why can't the same page just be responsive? Why do we need two different domains even, instead of the server serving a desktop or mobile page? Why does the mobile page not redirect back to desktop?
The Wikipedia page is just responsive. The Wikipedia Mobile page has a dedicated URL, and it assumes that, if you went to the trouble of requesting it specifically, that's because you specifically wanted it.
But it doesn't, if you go to the desktop site it redirects you to the mobile site. The desktop site isn't responsive, you get the desktop view on the phone, sidebar and all.
It has been said that mobile wikipedia is more user friendly on any platform, basically a more modern user interface than the standard desktop interface. Thus having benefit to everyone.
> He realized that Vasa had the wrong proportions even before she was launched
Not only did he realise it, he proved it. Days before launching the ship, he had 30 men run across the deck to demonstrate its stability. The ship listed badly and they stopped the demonstration before the King arrived.
And indeed, she tipped, foundered and sank on her maiden voyage.
> The Apple was therefore built wider than the Vasa, but despite this, the ship was not successful...
Being a "master shipbuilder" in those days was apparently a tough gig.