He in the purgatory: "Did I just end up here because of my mistakes and not accepting the Navy warnings? NO! THEY SABOTAGE ME...THEY KNEW MY SHIP WAS PERFECT AND THEY RUIN IT"
Coles: But no one can bully me about it, because I am dead. *150 ish years later* Drach comes along and starts bullying Coles about his ship. Coles: LEAVE ME IN PEACE.
Great little video. You neglected to mention that the first casualty of the Captain fiasco was the Royal Navy itself, when the refusal of responsible parties to pay any heed to his warnings caused the Chief Constructor (the very great Sir E J Reed) to resign over the matter in 1870, a few months before the fateful last cruise of HMS Captain. Reed had published a work "Our Ironclad Ships, Their Qualities, Performance & Cost' in 1868, complete with a chapter on turret ships which laid out exactly the problem with low freeboard, high C/G turret ships (like Captain) in respect of the stability issue. He went to great lengths to make understandable to the lay reader the danger of having an easily-reached point of unstable equilibrium - being the point in the roll at which the ship would be perfectly balanced while heeled at that particular angle, but beyond which it could never recover to the upright position and would capsize. Reed pointed out that, in the case of turret ships of very low freeboard coupled with high C/G, this could be reached easily while the inertia of the ship's roll was still greater than the ability of the water's resisting force to check it before the angle was passed. The warning was in print two years before the disaster and nobody listened to him, so he took his skills and left the Admiralty. A far greater loss than that ridiculous ship and her maverick creator (whose greatest creation - the gun turret - was already gifted to mankind long beforehand).
I don't think metacentric height was fully understood at the time. More care should have been taken over the extra weight being added to the ship, and it may have been overmasted. These were dynamic times for design and the Navy wanted sea-going turret ships to maintain mastery at sea.
@@malcolmtaylor518 Actually, metacentric heights were calculated for a number of different ships in Reed's book. It was clearly understood, although that's not to say mistakes could not still be made, as they would occasionally continue to be made. The biggest part of the problem was simply the refusal of certain parties to take any notice. Dismissiveness and tradition trumped maths in that debate, for the worse.
@@KrillLiberator My guess would be anybody who knew what they were doing. Avoided this project like the plague. My compliments on your knowledge of naval triva.
@@jimtaylor294 Have you seen the chieftains videos on the french early war light tanks. th-cam.com/video/tMqbkQcDe9E/w-d-xo.html th-cam.com/video/lwREJT3KfgY/w-d-xo.html
I would like this comment but is somehow feels disrespectful to the 500 who died We know, and the navy knew that his design was bad so who required the 500 deashes to work that out?
After that dark night of Finisterre a letterbox was seen in the Dockyard with a sign on it saying "letters for the captain may be posted here". The l"etterbox" simply dropped post into the sea. Black humour at its finest.
What a tragic and unnecessary catastrophe! One can only imagine the terror of the younger ones, both sailors and mid-shipmen, trapped inside the overturning ship at dead of night. Why on earth was Coles' design allowed by the Admiralty, even if grudgingly, and why was an experienced ship-builder like Lairds of Birkenhead prepared to build her, knowing that her freeboard was so low? Lairds were in a way doubly responsible, since apparently they added a large amount of extra weight(c.750 tons) to the ship, reducing her freeboard still further, when Coles wasn't supervising the project owing to his illness. One of the ironies was that the turrets, around which the ship was designed and which were deliberately placed low in Cole's design, were too low to use in even moderately bad weather and made the ship roll heavily when the guns were fired. In addition, their rate of fire was less than any comparable ships at the time, presumably because of the cramped conditions in the turrets for muzzle loading, so the whole concept of the ship was flawed. Has her wreck ever been located?
Sometimes bad ideas come down from above, in fact most bad ideas come down from above... and it's the grunts at the bottom that suffer the consequences. In this case, the go ahead for the ship came down for a politician..... Nuff said.....
It is absolutely extraordinary that Lairds could make such a bad mistake, given that this ship was, in appearance, simply a huge 'Laird Ram'. Or was she? The famous Laird ram, as a type, was a strictly littoral warship, even fitted out with seagoing accoutrements. The infamous Wivern-class were reputedly very poor seaboats; nevertheless they served and made Atlantic crossings without tragedy. But, where one would expect to see things such as collapsible bulwarks on such traditional 'medium size' rams as the Wivern or Huascar, or else better proportional freeboard for length or beam in, say, Schorpioen, Captain simply lacked either of these mitigating features. She was inexplicably built as a pure huge coastal turret ram, gifted with heavy masts and sent out to perform seagoing duties with the Fleet. Was this *really* all Laird's doing, or was there other external meddling at play here? One has to suspect that Lairds would at the very least have insisted on folding bulwarks, as in the contemporary Monarch. Unless they were vetoed?
I have to say that ships like this are important. It's easy to judge but what is common knowledge now was being learned then. That being said, not listening to the shipwrights and engineers proved to be disastrous in this case and I'm always of the mind to listen to people in a field I'm delving into. Good vid.
People often claim that these sort of things occurred as a result of experimenting with the unknown edge of the envelope, but the plain fact is this ship's loss was predicted mathematically by engineers two years before it happened - in the public domain, no less!
6:16 This is how I feel when I've spent hours designing a BB in From the Depths and I realize it's entirely too top-heavy. Sadly you can't just "slap some propellers underneath it, set the PID system to hover, and call it a day" IRL.
Fascinating, I remember father taking me to see the memorial in St Paul's cathedral & telling me about the disaster as my great grandfather had been a seaman on one of the boats searching for survivors, I was told that he had brought back a piece of rope as a memento which he had donated to the Masonic Museum in London.
And unlike HMS, when referring to a USS, one does say "the USS" since it would be the United States Ship which is fine. It's confusing and seems contradictory unless you say the abbreviations out loud which words to use and when.
It is 154 years today, 7 September 2024, when the HMS Captain sank. We WILL Remember Them. My greatgrandfather, John Walker, was one of the lucky 18 that survived. I am going to the museum at Cape Finisterre today where Alexandre Nerium, museum guide, will say & demonstrate, the history of fishing in the area. I was also here last year. I live in NZ and a long way from home. Kind regards, Stephen L. Walker..
Huh, if I were told to try and maximize turret firing arcs on a sailing vessel... my first idea (likely with its own issues) is to make a somewhat wider center hull, to allow for a stronger base to place much wider rigging than normal (perhaps involving masts made of more than one "main shaft" attached together in a triangle or something?), keeping the bow and stern fairly free of rigging, allowing the turrets to be placed ahead of and behind the rigging almost entirely. Immediate first thoughts as to issues and additional design traits with my first idea to come to mind: -Well, it likely won't perform as well in side-angle-winds as a longer set of masts, though it may perform fairly well with winds from the rear. -Wider hull means more drag? -Still, it would be potentially less likely to capsize and may be easier to armor with the extra displacement. -Hmm, what if the bow and stern were both elevated above the main deck, keeping the turrets dry and keeping the middle parts of the vessel closer to the water to maintain a lower center of mass despite elevated bow and stern turrets? When sailing directly towards or away from the enemy, this would also allow the bow and stern armor to protect part of the middle deck areas? -Would it be possible to tumblehome (or however its spelled) the bow and stern, while keeping the lower decked middle part non-tumblehome?
In front of me, I have nine old, frail pieces of paper on which my great-grandmother, born, Evangelina M. Acocks, (Married James Charles Purvis), born on St. Helena Island, wrote verses in black ink, in a neat and beautiful cursive style. One verse relating to the HMS Captain, ends with the word, ‘Foundered’ and is dated 8th. September, 1870. Each line of the verse commences with capital letters as follows; HMS CAPTAIN BC I understand that the surnames Acocks & Purvis were closely related in days gone by, and that the Purvis surname has direct links to Napoleon and the financing of the first Nautilus submarine, designed and built by American designer/inventor Robert Fulton. Herein lie the reasons for family members having been incarcerated on St. Helena Island. 😑
I think it was a clever design, let down by details (such as "should be fairly buoyant") The deck above the guns to hold the rigging and crew was a rather clever idea, and the low freeboard might have been acceptable if everything on that deck was waterproof (and designed to shed water rapidly) With enough beam to actually be self righting I think it might have worked. For a sailing boat the righting moment numbers are just terrible. They could probably careen it with a rowing boat tied to the mast.
It's really simple though, isn't it? There are three points of stability for the ship: the upright one, which is stable, and the two unstable points when the ship is heeled to either side, beyond which it capsizes. The earlier and easier that point is reached, the more likely the ship is to capsize.
Andrew Givens - really simple it is, but I still cannot wrap my head around the vector math in the basic placement of B down low, and G up higher: G points down & B up, so why doesn't the ship turn turtle immediately? It's obvious why B & G are where they are. Get M into the picture with righting arm, etc, and I'm fine. It's just that vector math at _t = 0_ that I don't get.....
@@77thTrombone I have both an undergrad class and an upgrade class in ship stability and trim. I can do the math and make it work, but sometimes the WHY far escapes me...
I don't know if you see comments on older videos but I heard about a boat used in the Crimean War in the Sea of Azov named "The Lady Nancy" that would make an interesting topic for a video.
1:01 - that is not a British turret test ship but one of the first three ironclads in the world - the French broadside ironclad "Lave" (of the "Devastacion" class)
The Coles turret was actually better than the Ericsson type on the monitor. We need to be realistic, these men were inventing the ironclad as they went along. No one knew what forms or armaments would win out. They were doing the best they could. The ship was overweight, due to lack of care in the material control during the build. I believe a Coles turret was in the Chilean Husacar.
Wonderful video, but I have a question: Why did the Royal Navy send Captain out on an overseas assignment when she was so dangerously unstable? From the way you worded it, it sounds like the Admiralty knew about the Captain's flaws to at least some degree before her loss and thus should've known that sending her out to sea for any length of time was courting disaster. Did Coles pressure them into it? Did one of Coles's supporters take command of the navy? Did the British admirals go totally bonkers? There's got to be a reason for putting Captain and her crew in such a dangerous position!
Because she was an ocean-going ironclad. IF you spend a fortune on an ocean going battleship and then you don't use it, it's a colossal waste of resources. The same politicians, and public pressure groups that had forced the Admiralty's hand into building that abomination in the first place, would've yelled and cried because their splendid, magnificent and amazing ship wasn't being used for what she was designed for (probably accusing the admiralty of not wanting to use "their" ship because they were afraid to show how much "superior" it was to HMS Monarch, the design the DNC and Admiralty had gone for instead of Coles' shitcraft). So they had to build it AND they had to use it.
Brilliant..... Maybe this qualifies as a buccaneer (a person who acts in a recklessly adventurous and often unscrupulous way, especially in business. "the company(Ship) might be a target for an individual buccaneer seeking power and prestige").... just how many ships failed so spectacularly. This is the first one I heard of, then again, I'm not a naval historian.
I've read somewhere that there was a post box mounted over the water in maybe Portsmouth harbour that had no bottom and it was labeled, "Mail for the HMS Captain." A suggestion? How about a video about Jackie Fisher? It would be appropriate.
How about the Mary Rose, Soverign of the Seas and HMS Warspite of WW1 and 2. I think the Sovreign of the Seas was the most beautiful ship that ever sailed and the other two of significant historical import.
@@Drachinifel Found the Warspite. It was great. They should raise it and make it a museum. Veteran of two major wars deserved better treatment!! Have a Trumpeter model of Warspite in 1/350 I plan to build. Hope I live long enough to do Sovereign of the Seas.
First of all let me say how brilliant your films are. I really enjoy them, and the humour. But: I’ve repeatedly heard you say “the” HMS before the ship’s name. It’s either ‘HMS Captain’ or ‘the Captain’. Never, ‘the HMS Captain’. I’m being a little pedantic I suppose, and we all make mistakes from time to time so I’m feeling a bit uncomfortable pointing this out, but my late father was a senior officer in the navy both during and after the war and he would have been very cross indeed. He would, however, have loved your films.
Good Lord, what an expensive (in lives) lesson to have. That bit at the front about the Valiant was amusing. I need to look that up sometime, I haven't heard of it 'til now. It almost makes me wish you covered tanks, too, because I'd love to hear you tear into Walter Christie's idiotic "Flying Tank" design.
@@lawrencelewis8105 only the officers I would think Knew anything... ships stability is a complex thing, and the common crew would not have much knowledge of it... ironclad ships were so new, there stability was not something sailors would intuitively feel.
@@stanislavkostarnov2157 True, but sailors are a pretty conservative lot. Anything new would be viewed with skepticism. It took a long time before steam power was taken seriously, for example.
@@lawrencelewis8105 it took a long time before steam power was serious though. I would have thought that any non-novice sailor would be able to look at the distance from deck to sea and instantly know that it would take on water.
It *was* a success. The Reed-designed HMS Monarch succeeded perfectly in carrying sails with turrets while having adequate stability; that's what Drach mentioned about the righting moments of the two ships. There was only one way a ship with Captain's freeboard could have been a success though - and that was carry no sailing rig. And *that* was exactly what Reed had already done with HMS Devastation, a highly successful twin-turret seagoing ship which entered service one year after Captain.
And kids, what did we learn today? Let thoose who are experienced in designing ships. do so. No matter how much better your design you think is. It aint.
It seems to me that use of coal as armor could have been expanded, starting in this era to mostly replace both metal armor and sails, and extending all the way through ww2, where coal could be burned for cruising, supplemented by oil for high speed sprints and during battles, with virtually all coal stored along the sides to serve as armor as well as fuel. I hear that crude oil even served as armor to some extent during the Iran-Iraq tanker war of the 1980s, in which the spilling crude sometimes smothered the fires and saved the tankers.
alan6832 - dust. It’s explosive when the bunkers get low and there’s a lot of it free in the air. The current theory is that’s what happened to the Lusitania when it got torpedoed.
The problem with public opinion, like democracy, is that sometimes the ignorant and the stupid's opinions prevail, like now in the US, via lobbying and with almost unlimited and anonymous funding of political manipulation!
Agreed. A stupid and ignorant person is the most dangerous type of person alive. Give them social, political and institutional power and their potential to destroy becomes limitless.
You Gentlemen have opened a Big can of worms... Hahaha Democracy has many failings. That is the ideal behind democratic republics. What makes it even a bigger mess. Is watching Stalin's U.S.S.R. do tank or ship design. Or many of Hitler's failed ideals/dreams..... The United States has had many of the same problems as Britain(in ship designed build). Because of politics and more so money. Being a major player in design. Not to say that, out right corruption never happens....... So, politics should always be controlled by a educated, and rational public. No sure thing there Lads.... Maybe, that is why I pray alot...
You guys are as ignorant as the public that u criticising here, democracy is fine when media are on your side, when media folowing some foreign power agenda then you have what you see. In helthy democracy media inviting proper specialists for the topic and convincing public to the "inteligent" solution...
@tamenga88 "Democracy fanbois conveniently leave out that part of history" ->The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC)-> your short and naive interpretation of this very long and complicated war/situation is nothing more than solid prove of your complete ignorance.
@@Bialy_1 How about when the media is pushing its own agenda? should democracies dictate what the media does? Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried.
Ericsson apparently drafted the design for the Monitor (including, one presumes, the turret) in the 1850s, before Coles had devised and patented his own turret. It would appear that the two men arrived at a similar (and not identical) solution largely independently of each other's work. But the one must have heard of the first one's design. They could hardly not have done.
HMS Captain, before you malign her, *IS* the reason that, while the French were sampling grand hotels, the British were Naval Defence Acting out classes of Royal Sovereigns & Majestics.
These men were inventing the ironclad fighting ship from scratch. We should cut them some slack. The Coles turret was well designed and perfectly serviceable. There is some evidence the displacement of the ship was over the specification. The flying deck was to handle the shrouds. These were experimental times, and no one knew what ship types would win out. Later on, when the public demand was for " we want eight and we won't wait", the public probably won the war because they gave the Navy enough dreadnoughts to thwart German aspirations.
I might be willing to give them that benifit of the doubt, if it weren't for the fact that the RN designers had already said "it's not going to be good, we want nothing to do with it".
В 1870 году броненосец британского флота загадочно затонул в Бискайском заливе,обломки шлюпок были представлены как найденные обломки корабля,корабль просто утащилоа на дно неведомая сила,а остальные корабли эскадры остались невридимыми.
And at that moment, the entire Royal Navy collectively said: "I told you so."
Coles' last thought: "Well, this is embarrassing. "
Pity he took so many men with him.
One is too many.
He in the purgatory:
"Did I just end up here because of my mistakes and not accepting the Navy warnings?
NO! THEY SABOTAGE ME...THEY KNEW MY SHIP WAS PERFECT AND THEY RUIN IT"
@@lordjor96 More like Hell with that attitude
Coles: But no one can bully me about it, because I am dead.
*150 ish years later*
Drach comes along and starts bullying Coles about his ship.
Coles: LEAVE ME IN PEACE.
Great little video.
You neglected to mention that the first casualty of the Captain fiasco was the Royal Navy itself, when the refusal of responsible parties to pay any heed to his warnings caused the Chief Constructor (the very great Sir E J Reed) to resign over the matter in 1870, a few months before the fateful last cruise of HMS Captain.
Reed had published a work "Our Ironclad Ships, Their Qualities, Performance & Cost' in 1868, complete with a chapter on turret ships which laid out exactly the problem with low freeboard, high C/G turret ships (like Captain) in respect of the stability issue. He went to great lengths to make understandable to the lay reader the danger of having an easily-reached point of unstable equilibrium - being the point in the roll at which the ship would be perfectly balanced while heeled at that particular angle, but beyond which it could never recover to the upright position and would capsize. Reed pointed out that, in the case of turret ships of very low freeboard coupled with high C/G, this could be reached easily while the inertia of the ship's roll was still greater than the ability of the water's resisting force to check it before the angle was passed.
The warning was in print two years before the disaster and nobody listened to him, so he took his skills and left the Admiralty. A far greater loss than that ridiculous ship and her maverick creator (whose greatest creation - the gun turret - was already gifted to mankind long beforehand).
I don't think metacentric height was fully understood at the time. More care should have been taken over the extra weight being added to the ship, and it may have been overmasted. These were dynamic times for design and the Navy wanted sea-going turret ships to maintain mastery at sea.
@@malcolmtaylor518 Actually, metacentric heights were calculated for a number of different ships in Reed's book. It was clearly understood, although that's not to say mistakes could not still be made, as they would occasionally continue to be made. The biggest part of the problem was simply the refusal of certain parties to take any notice. Dismissiveness and tradition trumped maths in that debate, for the worse.
@@KrillLiberator My guess would be anybody who knew what they were doing. Avoided this project like the plague.
My compliments on your knowledge of naval triva.
The nice thing about tanks is that capsizing is almost never an issue XD
Too bad no one told the Tiger! xD
Apart from when on a Side-Slope... or crabbing during a hill climb or having being designed by the french; this is true.
The best thing about tanks is not being in one.
^ ... unless you're the driver, or the gunner ;-) .
@@jimtaylor294 Have you seen the chieftains videos on the french early war light tanks.
th-cam.com/video/tMqbkQcDe9E/w-d-xo.html
th-cam.com/video/lwREJT3KfgY/w-d-xo.html
Shame that Cole had to take 500 men down with him before he'd shut up.
This has 69 likes so I won’t ruin it.
Now we have Twitter.
And kids, this is why is OK to admit our mistakes and accept we were wrong.
I would like this comment but is somehow feels disrespectful to the 500 who died
We know, and the navy knew that his design was bad so who required the 500 deashes to work that out?
After that dark night of Finisterre a letterbox was seen in the Dockyard with a sign on it saying "letters for the captain may be posted here". The l"etterbox" simply dropped post into the sea. Black humour at its finest.
That is a perfect piece of obscure trivia. Full marks to you, sir!
@@KrillLiberator I headr about that many years ago, don't recall where .
If HMS Captain somehow survived the gale would she have been demoted to HMS Commander?
No - she'd have been promoted to HMS Commodore.
Captain demoted to sub-lieutenant?
More like demoted to HMS Powder Monkey.
Demote it to HMS Water Boy
@@chucklott6403 And put to desk duty...
What a tragic and unnecessary catastrophe! One can only imagine the terror of the younger ones, both sailors and mid-shipmen, trapped inside the overturning ship at dead of night.
Why on earth was Coles' design allowed by the Admiralty, even if grudgingly, and why was an experienced ship-builder like Lairds of Birkenhead prepared to build her, knowing that her freeboard was so low? Lairds were in a way doubly responsible, since apparently they added a large amount of extra weight(c.750 tons) to the ship, reducing her freeboard still further, when Coles wasn't supervising the project owing to his illness.
One of the ironies was that the turrets, around which the ship was designed and which were deliberately placed low in Cole's design, were too low to use in even moderately bad weather and made the ship roll heavily when the guns were fired. In addition, their rate of fire was less than any comparable ships at the time, presumably because of the cramped conditions in the turrets for muzzle loading, so the whole concept of the ship was flawed. Has her wreck ever been located?
Sometimes bad ideas come down from above, in fact most bad ideas come down from above... and it's the grunts at the bottom that suffer the consequences. In this case, the go ahead for the ship came down for a politician..... Nuff said.....
@@CS-zn6pp True, but the politician concerned was so sure she was a good idea, he had his son appointed as one of her officers. He didn't survive.
It is absolutely extraordinary that Lairds could make such a bad mistake, given that this ship was, in appearance, simply a huge 'Laird Ram'.
Or was she? The famous Laird ram, as a type, was a strictly littoral warship, even fitted out with seagoing accoutrements. The infamous Wivern-class were reputedly very poor seaboats; nevertheless they served and made Atlantic crossings without tragedy. But, where one would expect to see things such as collapsible bulwarks on such traditional 'medium size' rams as the Wivern or Huascar, or else better proportional freeboard for length or beam in, say, Schorpioen, Captain simply lacked either of these mitigating features. She was inexplicably built as a pure huge coastal turret ram, gifted with heavy masts and sent out to perform seagoing duties with the Fleet.
Was this *really* all Laird's doing, or was there other external meddling at play here?
One has to suspect that Lairds would at the very least have insisted on folding bulwarks, as in the contemporary Monarch. Unless they were vetoed?
Oh Captain, my Captain!
Sunk'est are thou!
blub
blub
blub
blub
Sweden: Vasa
Coles: "Hold my beer..."
Vasa was worse though. It didn't even leave the harbor before it sank due to a slight breeze
@@MrAhnassi Mary Rose
Sailing a ship in rough seas isn't dangerous..... So long as the captain remembers that sailing a ship in rough seas is dangerous.....
I think the whole problem was it wasn't rough seas just a useless excuse for vessel.
Don't pin the blame on the captain of that floating disaster
HMS Captain may have been discovered. Checked to see if Drach had a guide on the ship and wasn’t disappointed.
Public opinion leads to disastrous outcome despite experts warning about it....couldn’t happen today could it....
*cough*
A rare example of a comment that aged well
Note the whale who was Free Willy
US 2020: .................. *WELL THIS SUCKS*
"Can you say F-35 ?"
Are we absolutely *certain* there were no Japanese torpedo boats reported in the vicinity that night?
I have to say that ships like this are important. It's easy to judge but what is common knowledge now was being learned then. That being said, not listening to the shipwrights and engineers proved to be disastrous in this case and I'm always of the mind to listen to people in a field I'm delving into. Good vid.
People often claim that these sort of things occurred as a result of experimenting with the unknown edge of the envelope, but the plain fact is this ship's loss was predicted mathematically by engineers two years before it happened - in the public domain, no less!
6:16 This is how I feel when I've spent hours designing a BB in From the Depths and I realize it's entirely too top-heavy. Sadly you can't just "slap some propellers underneath it, set the PID system to hover, and call it a day" IRL.
To the surprise of no one, this was the last ship ever to be named HMS Captain.
Too bad. Nelson wrecked so much at St. Vincent in HMS Captain.
The light cruiser, SMS Emden and the voyage of the crew back to Germany.
We have previously covered the WW1 Scharnhorst class :)
I guess you could say that the shipbuilder went down with his captain...
Fascinating, I remember father taking me to see the memorial in St Paul's cathedral & telling me about the disaster as my great grandfather had been a seaman on one of the boats searching for survivors, I was told that he had brought back a piece of rope as a memento which he had donated to the Masonic Museum in London.
Hi - you probably know this but..... it's incorrect to say "The HMS". The HMS would mean The Her Majesty's Ship. It's just HMS Captain - no "The".
Yeah, it's a bad habitnim trying to get rid of.
And unlike HMS, when referring to a USS, one does say "the USS" since it would be the United States Ship which is fine.
It's confusing and seems contradictory unless you say the abbreviations out loud which words to use and when.
I'm confused...LITERALLY EVERYONE SAYS 'The' before a ship's name and prefix.
When naming a ship "Captain" is the smartest thing they did with it . . . .
It is 154 years today, 7 September 2024, when the HMS Captain sank. We WILL Remember Them. My greatgrandfather, John Walker, was one of the lucky 18 that survived. I am going to the museum at Cape Finisterre today where Alexandre Nerium, museum guide, will say & demonstrate, the history of fishing in the area. I was also here last year. I live in NZ and a long way from home. Kind regards, Stephen L. Walker..
*Well done indeed. Thank you for creating these videos!!!*
Huh, if I were told to try and maximize turret firing arcs on a sailing vessel... my first idea (likely with its own issues) is to make a somewhat wider center hull, to allow for a stronger base to place much wider rigging than normal (perhaps involving masts made of more than one "main shaft" attached together in a triangle or something?), keeping the bow and stern fairly free of rigging, allowing the turrets to be placed ahead of and behind the rigging almost entirely.
Immediate first thoughts as to issues and additional design traits with my first idea to come to mind:
-Well, it likely won't perform as well in side-angle-winds as a longer set of masts, though it may perform fairly well with winds from the rear.
-Wider hull means more drag?
-Still, it would be potentially less likely to capsize and may be easier to armor with the extra displacement.
-Hmm, what if the bow and stern were both elevated above the main deck, keeping the turrets dry and keeping the middle parts of the vessel closer to the water to maintain a lower center of mass despite elevated bow and stern turrets? When sailing directly towards or away from the enemy, this would also allow the bow and stern armor to protect part of the middle deck areas?
-Would it be possible to tumblehome (or however its spelled) the bow and stern, while keeping the lower decked middle part non-tumblehome?
Intro was 10 out of ten will watch again!🤣
Rule No.1........ If it looks dangerous, It usually is.
Two naval disasters in 1870 the first was Edward Reed resigning as Chief Constructor, the second was this.
Futurama reference on point.
In front of me, I have nine old, frail pieces of paper on which my great-grandmother, born, Evangelina M. Acocks, (Married James Charles Purvis), born on St. Helena Island, wrote verses in black ink, in a neat and beautiful cursive style. One verse relating to the HMS Captain, ends with the word, ‘Foundered’ and is dated 8th. September, 1870. Each line of the verse commences with capital letters as follows; HMS CAPTAIN BC
I understand that the surnames Acocks & Purvis were closely related in days gone by, and that the Purvis surname has direct links to Napoleon and the financing of the first Nautilus submarine, designed and built by American designer/inventor Robert Fulton. Herein lie the reasons for family members having been incarcerated on St. Helena Island. 😑
This is an intresting history of the Her Majesty's Ship Captain.
Vespelian I thought it was High Mount Seas...but idk, never got to learn naval history in the US
I see what you did there. It annoyed me too...
Q&A: Could you explain the metacentric height? And possibly any other significant ship physics explainable? Thank you!
Read Edward Reed's work on the matter of turret ships and stability, as detailed in my longer post. It. Explains. Everything.
Extra points for Futurama reference
Does anyone know anything about her wreck, has it been found.
It would probably be one of the oldest wrecks of any metal warship.
I think it was a clever design, let down by details (such as "should be fairly buoyant")
The deck above the guns to hold the rigging and crew was a rather clever idea, and the low freeboard might have been acceptable if everything on that deck was waterproof (and designed to shed water rapidly)
With enough beam to actually be self righting I think it might have worked.
For a sailing boat the righting moment numbers are just terrible. They could probably careen it with a rowing boat tied to the mast.
So this was probably the most ironic instance of a Captain going down with the ship...
As always a great and interesting story. Many thanks @Drachinifel !
Great vid Drach! RIP to those lost men, such a waste.
Good job explaining the stability without trying to go into explaining the complicated world of stability curved!
It's really simple though, isn't it? There are three points of stability for the ship: the upright one, which is stable, and the two unstable points when the ship is heeled to either side, beyond which it capsizes. The earlier and easier that point is reached, the more likely the ship is to capsize.
Andrew Givens - really simple it is, but I still cannot wrap my head around the vector math in the basic placement of B down low, and G up higher: G points down & B up, so why doesn't the ship turn turtle immediately?
It's obvious why B & G are where they are.
Get M into the picture with righting arm, etc, and I'm fine.
It's just that vector math at _t = 0_ that I don't get.....
@@77thTrombone I have both an undergrad class and an upgrade class in ship stability and trim. I can do the math and make it work, but sometimes the WHY far escapes me...
Stephen Britton - Ha! So it's not just me, then....
Just got a GREAT book. "Battleship Warspite" by Robert Brown. A modeler' delight with detailed plans.
I think I met the author of it once
Look for “ H.M.S. Warspite” by Captain S.W. Raskill, D.S.C., R.N. (1957). A thorough history of a much decorated ship.
@@robertrooney1272 Thank you. I will get it. I love that ship.
It looked pretty cool, though. So at least there's that...
I don't know if you see comments on older videos but I heard about a boat used in the Crimean War in the Sea of Azov named "The Lady Nancy" that would make an interesting topic for a video.
Well the starting was different and funny.
1:01 - that is not a British turret test ship but one of the first three ironclads in the world - the French broadside ironclad "Lave" (of the "Devastacion" class)
It's the same class of floating battery (shared design due to the Crimean War), and the only available picture of the type.
BTW I love the Valliant tank. It served a purpose for future designs and didn't kill anyone (that I know of)
Cute Futurama shout out.
The Coles turret was actually better than the Ericsson type on the monitor. We need to be realistic, these men were inventing the ironclad as they went along. No one knew what forms or armaments would win out. They were doing the best they could. The ship was overweight, due to lack of care in the material control during the build. I believe a Coles turret was in the Chilean Husacar.
this is a famous ship in the history of ships...was her wreck ever found????
Lrrr approves of this video and your puny earthling warships!
Wonderful video, but I have a question: Why did the Royal Navy send Captain out on an overseas assignment when she was so dangerously unstable? From the way you worded it, it sounds like the Admiralty knew about the Captain's flaws to at least some degree before her loss and thus should've known that sending her out to sea for any length of time was courting disaster. Did Coles pressure them into it? Did one of Coles's supporters take command of the navy? Did the British admirals go totally bonkers? There's got to be a reason for putting Captain and her crew in such a dangerous position!
Because she was an ocean-going ironclad. IF you spend a fortune on an ocean going battleship and then you don't use it, it's a colossal waste of resources. The same politicians, and public pressure groups that had forced the Admiralty's hand into building that abomination in the first place, would've yelled and cried because their splendid, magnificent and amazing ship wasn't being used for what she was designed for (probably accusing the admiralty of not wanting to use "their" ship because they were afraid to show how much "superior" it was to HMS Monarch, the design the DNC and Admiralty had gone for instead of Coles' shitcraft).
So they had to build it AND they had to use it.
Brilliant..... Maybe this qualifies as a buccaneer (a person who acts in a recklessly adventurous and often unscrupulous way, especially in business. "the company(Ship) might be a target for an individual buccaneer seeking power and prestige").... just how many ships failed so spectacularly. This is the first one I heard of, then again, I'm not a naval historian.
I've read somewhere that there was a post box mounted over the water in maybe Portsmouth harbour that had no bottom and it was labeled, "Mail for the HMS Captain."
A suggestion? How about a video about Jackie Fisher? It would be appropriate.
If HMS Captain was built the way it should have been, would it still capsize at the end of the day?
Do Sir George Tryon's flagship, HMS Victoria.
Q&A how accurate where navel guns at key points in the 20th century 1905, 1917, 1938 and 1945?
an almost impossible question to answer due to the myriad of external factors
Maybe asking about Gunnery control technology evolution, you could get an awser for that.
Navel guns seem like they'd be rather hard to aim...
How about the Mary Rose, Soverign of the Seas and HMS Warspite of WW1 and 2. I think the Sovreign of the Seas was the most beautiful ship that ever sailed and the other two of significant historical import.
Warspite has a video already. :) Sovereign of the Seas is die to come :)
@@Drachinifel Found the Warspite. It was great. They should raise it and make it a museum. Veteran of two major wars deserved better treatment!! Have a Trumpeter model of Warspite in 1/350 I plan to build. Hope I live long enough to do Sovereign of the Seas.
So Captain Coles inadvertently designed and built the Royals navy their first U boat.
One of my family was lost on the H.M.S. Captain. Thomas Henry Hurrell, seamen.
May he rest in peace
I can kinda see what he was thinking, its like a ship of the line but with turrets.
6:10 .. Until the HMS Olympia came :D
First of all let me say how brilliant your films are. I really enjoy them, and the humour. But: I’ve repeatedly heard you say “the” HMS before the ship’s name. It’s either ‘HMS Captain’ or ‘the Captain’. Never, ‘the HMS Captain’. I’m being a little pedantic I suppose, and we all make mistakes from time to time so I’m feeling a bit uncomfortable pointing this out, but my late father was a senior officer in the navy both during and after the war and he would have been very cross indeed. He would, however, have loved your films.
Was there a way to design Captain and get the same pros: sail+steam, turrets, wide fields of fire - without the instability?
Yes
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Monarch_(1868)
Anyone know the fate of the wreck? Has it been found etc?
Good Lord, what an expensive (in lives) lesson to have.
That bit at the front about the Valiant was amusing. I need to look that up sometime, I haven't heard of it 'til now. It almost makes me wish you covered tanks, too, because I'd love to hear you tear into Walter Christie's idiotic "Flying Tank" design.
The TOG 2 is also good for a chuckle
@@williamchamberlain2263
I've played World of Tanks, so I know of the TOG 2. ;)
I'd love to see him do helms deep from lotr. With reference to the lotr secret diaries (do not be drinking coffee).
Aww, I broke my carrot...
I wonder how many of those ordinary crewmen realized that they were sailing on a death trap?
probably all of them but orders are orders, stupid as they might be.
@@lawrencelewis8105 only the officers I would think Knew anything... ships stability is a complex thing, and the common crew would not have much knowledge of it... ironclad ships were so new, there stability was not something sailors would intuitively feel.
@@stanislavkostarnov2157 True, but sailors are a pretty conservative lot. Anything new would be viewed with skepticism. It took a long time before steam power was taken seriously, for example.
@@lawrencelewis8105 it took a long time before steam power was serious though.
I would have thought that any non-novice sailor would be able to look at the distance from deck to sea and instantly know that it would take on water.
Yer way better on yer photo library. You don’t use emojis and question marks haha. Keep up the good work I love it no matter
Yes but wasn’t Captain Cole a Royal NAVY member?
What if the ship had been designed with adequate stability? Would the two turret concept have been a success?
It *was* a success. The Reed-designed HMS Monarch succeeded perfectly in carrying sails with turrets while having adequate stability; that's what Drach mentioned about the righting moments of the two ships.
There was only one way a ship with Captain's freeboard could have been a success though - and that was carry no sailing rig. And *that* was exactly what Reed had already done with HMS Devastation, a highly successful twin-turret seagoing ship which entered service one year after Captain.
And kids, what did we learn today? Let thoose who are experienced in designing ships. do so. No matter how much better your design you think is. It aint.
A negative result is a also a result, that must be studied and conclusions must be drawn.
The Titanic Submarine is starting to remind me a lot of HMS Captain
It seems to me that use of coal as armor could have been expanded, starting in this era to mostly replace both metal armor and sails, and extending all the way through ww2, where coal could be burned for cruising, supplemented by oil for high speed sprints and during battles, with virtually all coal stored along the sides to serve as armor as well as fuel. I hear that crude oil even served as armor to some extent during the Iran-Iraq tanker war of the 1980s, in which the spilling crude sometimes smothered the fires and saved the tankers.
alan6832 - dust. It’s explosive when the bunkers get low and there’s a lot of it free in the air.
The current theory is that’s what happened to the Lusitania when it got torpedoed.
From Wikipedia "The First Lord of the Admiralty, Hugh Childers, and Under-Secretary of State for War, Thomas Baring, both lost sons in the disaster."
Coles is so lucky he went down with the ship or Baring and Childers would've had his ass mounted over the fireplace
at least Coles went down with his ship, shame he took 400 others with him
The problem with public opinion, like democracy, is that sometimes the ignorant and the stupid's opinions prevail, like now in the US, via lobbying and with almost unlimited and anonymous funding of political manipulation!
Agreed. A stupid and ignorant person is the most dangerous type of person alive. Give them social, political and institutional power and their potential to destroy becomes limitless.
You Gentlemen have opened a Big can of worms...
Hahaha
Democracy has many failings.
That is the ideal behind democratic republics.
What makes it even a bigger mess.
Is watching Stalin's U.S.S.R. do tank or ship design.
Or many of Hitler's failed ideals/dreams.....
The United States has had many of the same problems as Britain(in ship designed build). Because of politics and more so money. Being a major player in design. Not to say that, out right corruption never happens.......
So, politics should always be controlled by a educated, and rational public. No sure thing there Lads....
Maybe, that is why I pray alot...
You guys are as ignorant as the public that u criticising here, democracy is fine when media are on your side, when media folowing some foreign power agenda then you have what you see. In helthy democracy media inviting proper specialists for the topic and convincing public to the "inteligent" solution...
@tamenga88 "Democracy fanbois conveniently leave out that part of history" ->The Peloponnesian War (431-404 BC)-> your short and naive interpretation of this very long and complicated war/situation is nothing more than solid prove of your complete ignorance.
@@Bialy_1 How about when the media is pushing its own agenda? should democracies dictate what the media does?
Democracy is the worst form of government - except for all the others that have been tried.
got to love Sa. am !
Awesome thanks
Wait, so HMS By Jove would have worked???
I hope public opinion had a good hard look itself afterwards.
Was this turret known to Erricsson when he was developing his turret for USS Monitor ?
Ericsson apparently drafted the design for the Monitor (including, one presumes, the turret) in the 1850s, before Coles had devised and patented his own turret. It would appear that the two men arrived at a similar (and not identical) solution largely independently of each other's work. But the one must have heard of the first one's design. They could hardly not have done.
USS Galena (1862) please
Not gonna lie... the OCEANGATE catastrophe completely reminds me of this.
HMS Captain, before you malign her, *IS* the reason that, while the French were sampling grand hotels, the British were Naval Defence Acting out classes of Royal Sovereigns & Majestics.
With some changes to the design it could’ve made one hell of a ship
Lrrr...Was that a Futurama reference? (0:08)
Yep.
Did it really take 6 1/2 minutes to tell the tale? That's longer than the ship was in service.
These men were inventing the ironclad fighting ship from scratch. We should cut them some slack. The Coles turret was well designed and perfectly serviceable. There is some evidence the displacement of the ship was over the specification. The flying deck was to handle the shrouds. These were experimental times, and no one knew what ship types would win out. Later on, when the public demand was for " we want eight and we won't wait", the public probably won the war because they gave the Navy enough dreadnoughts to thwart German aspirations.
I might be willing to give them that benifit of the doubt, if it weren't for the fact that the RN designers had already said "it's not going to be good, we want nothing to do with it".
Sad that so many lost their lives because of arrogance and ignorance
Blame the French.
So, shipbuilding should be done by people who actually know how to build ships. Wow, who would have thought?
Not Cole apparently ;)
It is rare that people celebrate the death of a designer, this was one of the times.
2:01 That Captain Coles has somewhat of a fanatical look about him. He shouldn’t have been allowed to design a Royal Navy ship.
My relation Robert Sheepshanks, one of the officers, went down with her.
whoops I was in error this turret was post USS Monitor sorry about that.
CSS Stonewall?
Is there any equivalent US vessel?
USS Zumwalt?
A classic tail of centre of gravity and low freeboard
NO THIS TANK WAS NOT. that's Fletcher and he's the current version of belton cooper,
So no lessons learned from the Mary rose capsize.
В 1870 году броненосец британского флота загадочно затонул в Бискайском заливе,обломки шлюпок были представлены как найденные обломки корабля,корабль просто утащилоа на дно неведомая сила,а остальные корабли эскадры остались невридимыми.