Cool Boat/Real Life: Difference between revisions

== When men and women sailed the seas, using literal sails, there was still cool. These are examples of [[Pun|Epic Sails]]... ==

* [[Horny Vikings|Viking]] Longships, capable of both crossing the ocean and sailing up rivers, carrying [[Blood Knight|bloodthirsty pillagers]], was a terrifying sight for European villages and cities for 200 years. Norsemen could also build one on a spot. With an axe.

** Admiral Yi's variant was not only fully closed, but the first known ship with iron armor and built for long-range cannon fire. And a smoke screen dispenser. And one cannon on the ram, to fire ''inside'' a breached hull after ramming. "Turtle ships" were faster and more maneuverable than one would expect, due to the combination of sails and oars as well as overall good design (based on a ramming ship and not too overweighted); the Japanese ships opposing them were faster, but haven't long-range weapons and like most of their contemporaries relied mostly on boarding, so the "turtles" had enough of opportunities to ram.

* The ''USS Constitution'', better known as Old Ironsides, is the oldest ship still seaworthy, having been built in 1797. During the War of 1812, it sunk several British ships, raising the morale of the Navy. The ship's hull was so strong that cannonballs bounced off it like it was [[Made of Iron]], hence its nickname. Note that it's actually made of wood.

* The legendary Nova Scotian schooner, the ''Bluenose''. Launched in 1921, for 17 straight years she was undefeated in any racing and fishing competitions she entered. She also starred in the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and George V's Silver Jubilee. The ''Bluenose'' has been on Canadian dimes since ''1937''.

* The ''[http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/05_02/cuttysarkG2105_468x372.jpg Cutty Sark]'', a tea clipper so fast it remained profitable to run well into the age of steam-powered boats.

* There are still cool sailboats in the modern world; witness the [http://www.symaltesefalcon.com/about.asp Maltese Falcon]. Also, it has a vintage Bentley as a coffee table decoration.

 

 

* HMS ''Dreadnought''. Admiral Jackie Fisher was made head of the Royal Navy because he had a plan to economize on naval expenditure. That plan involved using submarines to defend against invasions and building battleships that were bigger and faster than anything else in service. ''Dreadnought'' was the prototype of these and was probably the most famous ship in the world until the ''Titanic'' sank- when it came out other nations suspended their battleship programmes for a while to adjust to it. Hell, in naval history parlance the prewar years are often called the Dreadnought Era.

** And previous genereations of battleships were collectively renamed as "predreadnoughts". The ''Dreadnought'' also carries the distinction of being the only battleship in WWI to sink a submarine - by ramming, no less.

* Before aircraft carriers evolved into their current, more standardised, forms, one notable design was the converted ''Courageous''-class cruisers, which had two separate decks: the hangar opened directly onto a shorter flying-off deck at the front of the ship, with a longer landing deck built on the floor above. At the same time, the Japanese carrier ''Akagi'' took this a step further, with '''three''' flight decks stacked above one another. The designs proved to be inefficient, but both win major cool points.

* The ''Yamato''. Largest battleship made (surpassed in military vessel size only by the Nimitz supercarriers), which automatically makes it a [[Cool Boat]], even if it was sunk before causing much damage. Also, the anime ''[[Uchuu Senkan Yamato]]'' turned it into a [[Cool Starship]], which has to earn it extra points.

* The German battleships ''Bismarck'' and ''Tirpitz'' deserve a mention, too. Although not quite as big as the ''Yamato'', they were still larger and more heavily armed than nearly any Allied ship and terrorised the north Atlantic. After ''Bismarck'' was destroyed in battle against several British warships, ''Tirpitz'' retreated to a naval base in Norway, but it still scared the <s>Allies</s> British enough for them to stage an epic commando raid to deny it a dry dock in France and later a massive air raid in order to sink it (they did, after hitting it with a dozen bombs. Two of the craters left by the bombs that missed are used as artificial lakes today).

** The ''Bismarck'' stands out in memory for performing the feat of blowing up Britain's favorite battlecruiser, the ''Hood'', almost before the battle had really started (luck played its part there, to be sure, but still) and for her own arguably heroic last stand against an overwhelming force only days afterwards -- both on her very first actual mission. I'd like to draw a direct parallel to the ''Titanic'', which is likewise remembered first and foremost for that tragic encounter with the iceberg on her maiden voyage...I think the fate of both ships captured the public imagination in a similar fashion. How well either might have done in practice if their respective careers ''had'' lasted longer doesn't really affect the myths built around them anymore.

* The ''Iowa'' class battleships, rather than going for the [[Awesome but Impractical]] that the ''Yamato'' turned out to be, were smaller, faster, and while not as extravagantly armed and armored as the better-known Japanese battleships, had plenty of weapons and armor for the war. It should be noted that ''Iowa'' class battleships were the only true battleships to be kept in serious service past World War Two, continually updated with new weapons. Still impractical nowadays, and they are now effectively retired, but no other ship in this section of the list, including the famed-but-terminally impractical ''Yamato'', is still in service.

*** [[Nerdgasm|...I'll be in my bunk.]]

* The ''North Carolina'' class battleships, particularly the North Carolina herself. She was originally stationed in the Atlantic to so that she would be available to fight the Tirpitz. When the Tirpitz was a no-show, she was stationed to the Pacific, becoming the first new ship to arrive in the theatre since Pearl Harbor. From there she spent her first few months escorting the ''Enterprise.'' During the Battle for Guadalcanal, the North Carolina laid down such an incredible amount of anti-air that the captain of the Enterprise radioed in to ask if she was on fire.

* The USCGC ''Taney,'' a Treasury-class cutter and the only surviving vessel that fought at Pearl Harbor. Currently parked in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.

* GTS Finnjet, the fastest conventional ferry ever built. Able to hit 33.5 knots on gas turbines and diesels, had a strengthened bow for handling sea ice. Legends abound of outrunning newer fast craft and rescuing an icebreaker during a particularly hard winter.

* Two absurdly dangerous ships that don't receive much attention. The two first true minelayers, Amur and its sister-ship Yenisey (named after the rivers on Far East) carried 300 [[Sea Mine|sea mines]] each, and at that time the Russian Empire probably has the best ones. The co-designer and captain of Yenisey was a proponent of the offensive minelaying (as in, "after a minelayer's stern vanishes with the morning mist, you still have a port, but can neither exit nor enter it") and inventor of the system spawning minefields at 10 knots. When these ships were designed, the Russo-Japanese war was unconceivable. It was a weapon made to "[[Decades of Darkness|end the Great Game in checkmate]]" (together with the rest of Russian and allied Japanese fleet, of course) and most likely able to do it, not to hide in a port each morning. In the war for which they weren't made minelayers haven't much accomplishments, but 14 May 1904 Hatsuse and Yashima blew up and sunk in a minefield near Port Arthur, left by Amur on their patrol route -- and that was two Japanese battleships more than ''the whole Russian fleet'' managed to destroy at Tsushima. This minefield was mere 1/6 of the Amur's full load and not quite the sort of tactics this ship was supposed to use.

** Don't know why they thought the "old" armament needed help. The nine 16-inch guns could each fire a 2,000-pound projectile over 20 miles, leaving an impact crater the size of a ''football field''. [http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2e/Uss_iowa_bb-61_pr.jpg Looks as cool as it sounds].

*** Because the old armament is completely helpless against even small missile boats which would laugh at ''only'' 20 miles of range. Small missile boats can pack missiles with ranges over ''three times that much'', at least. It needed those upgrades to not be a complete sitting duck against modern weaponry. Not to mention that the 20 anti ship missiles of the Kirov class missile cruisers, which the Iowas were supposed to counter, had a range about 12 times as great as the Harpoon anti ship missiles used by the Iowas, were supersonic and were designed to be fired in salvos of 4 or 8 with all missiles in a salvo cooperating to destroy the target.

* The South Korean ''Sejong the Great'' destroyers, like ''Arleigh Burkes'', but with 128 VLS cells, 16 dedicated anti-shipping missiles and two choppers. It is, as of 2011, the largest surface warfare ship class to carry the Aegis combat system.

 

== Submarines have always been cool... ==

** It's been proposed that the unused Typhoon hulls be converted to transport submarines with 15000 tonnes of cargo capacity.

* ...and its counterpart, the US Navy's ''Ohio''-class SSBN. So damned quiet, enemy crews learned to listen for suspicious areas of completely silent water rather than trying to pick up anything aboard the boat itself.

** Yes the US Navy was so concerned with the results that they rented the submarine for a year to try to figure out how it does what it does and how the hell to prevent it, [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1UPG7XwhWw&feature=related after that year they were not much closer to a solution than when they started.]

*** They know most of the 'hows' for what it does. The problem is, the how boils down to 'it incorporates every stealth-trick there was when they were laid down, diesel-electric engines are naturally less noisy than nuclear fission, and the Stirling engine extends their underwater endurance to lengths only (then) rivaled by nuclear submarines'. It's hard to figure out how to solve a problem that is fundamentally the exact same problem as before (How To Find A Quiet Moving Underwater Object), only harder.

* And of course the first real submarine: the German Type XXI U-Boot, designed to be submerged most of the time instead of spending most of the time above the surface like the other submarines of the time, it is the inspiration for most of the later submarines, though like many of Germany's late war projects this too was unfinshed and only two submarines made patrols where they both failed to actually sink something.

 

** Not to mention now forever stuck in our memories with [[Never Live It Down|a bad paintjob,and being called the Bat-mobile]].

* Was replace with the "Gojjira"(japanese for Godzilla). Yes, they were entertained by the Japanese radio messages of "We are being attacked by Godzilla!"

 

== But before that/When you want get around the world in a hurry.. ==

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