Vestas Wind. The navigator calculated the fastest course was straight across a reef over thirty miles wide and appearing on every chart since the 17th century.
The reef begged to differ.
#FailureFriday
HMAS Canberra did its bit to foster cordial relationships with New Zealand this week, mostly by making sure the the Kiwis couldn't go online and say nasty things like "why the fuck are you blocking our internet?"
Stunningly ugly even by the standards of car carriers, this exhibit here is Adige (and previously about half a dozen other names). Regretfully its aesthetics weren't the worst of it - a collision with the liner Jupiter in 1988 killed four including a schoolchild and a teacher. The captain was subsequently jailed for 73 months.
And so to North Korea, where a plan to amuse and delight the Dear Leader by bodily yeeting their newest warship off the side of the dock and into the water has come badly unstuck - leaving the vessel stranded on its side and apparently broken in two.
The Dear Leader is mightily pissed off, and no doubt the engineer who forgot to carry the one in his calculations is hurriedly hunting for somebody - anybody - else to blame, and quite possibly also a massive roll of duck tape.
No joking for this #FailureFriday - an interim report on the foundering of the sailing megayacht Bayesian has been released by the MAIB, and it's absolutely eyepopping.
You can read the report for yourself - it's not overly technical - and I'll pull some bits out into a thread below.
Not sure what went wrong here, but at least I know it's my own fault.
Chunk 1117 of 2430 - 11.18 Gb bytes in 10m60s (18.63 MB/s)
Not-so-supercarrier Harry S Truman is currently enjoying quite the cruise - clattering into a bulker off Suez, losing its CO as an expression of displeasure from the brass, and now rejoicing in the nickname USS Raid due to its ability to destroy F/A-18 Super Hornets.
Admittedly one was helped into the briny by USS Gettysburg chucking a missile at it, but one simply rolled off the side and the other plopped off the end in a failed landing.
There will no doubt be paperwork...
Leaked analysis from Russia suggests that - amongst many, many other issues - dockyard corruption meant missile-toting, mirth-promoting Moskva here sailed with radar domes covered with radio-opaque paint.
The more electronically-minded of you will notice this is a suboptimal state of affairs, and one that was certainly optimal in the process of conversion to submarine.
What air defence doing? Staring at the inside of its own head, apparently.
And so to the Bayeux Tapestry, where an extraordinary row over the precise number of willies has broken out. And I'm not talking about the Conqueror.
One chap says a sword is actually a penis, his rival is claiming that's a case of historical Freud. Clearly there's been a cock-up somewhere - or is it all a phallusy?
And so to South Africa, where recent Russian achievements in the field of "losing a naval war against a country without a navy" have been matched by losing a helicopter in single combat with a penguin.
After escaping captivity, and taking its definition as a flightless bird extremely seriously, the angry Antarctical avian charged the pilot and created a right old fowl up - and, indeed, down.
Forget tariffs - if you want the perfect way to p-p-p-p-piss off a penguin what you really need is Ky Michaelson's rocket-powered snowmobile.
Not one of nature's natural health and safety inspectors, Ky managed to spin helplessly out of control twice before deciding to add some skis to actually steer the thing.
Eventually he set a world record of 114mph in what scientists call "the contraption" and is still here to tell the tale. Not such a #FailureFriday after all...
Proper #FailureFriday for you now - survey ship Fugro Mercator applied inadvisable empirical methods to proving an Italian island was exactly where the chart said it would be earlier this week, and accordingly paid the price.
It's either that or the captain didn't know his arse from his Elba...
Weighing 69 tons, boasting two turrets and making no sense, the Char 2C tank remains the most voluminous tank ever built.
Commissioned in murky circumstances - the French didn't need a superheavy tank, the French didn't want a superheavy tank, and the naval shipyard that happily accepted the cash couldn't even build a normally heavy tank - everything went tits up when the public discovered they'd paid for a superheavy tank and demanded to see one.
Unsurprisingly it was crap.
The real tragedy here is that in another era they could have got fifty quid off You've Been Framed for this...
@DreadShips welcome back, I didn't realise how much I'd missed #FailureFriday until this!
In a case of literal Brough justice, H&S Wisdom has completely buggered up its attempt to navigate the Humber estuary and will now be stuck outside the Yorkshire town until the next properly big tides in a month or so. If, that is, they're big enough to lift it - and they might not be.
And is it a hazard to navigation? Well not there it isn't, no...
@JenLucPiquant I’m considering this an honorary #FailureFriday post
I miss the #FailureFriday posts from @DreadShips
#FailureFriday might also apply ...
sometimes the beauty lies in the error…so embrace it.
Stills from a js vector animation
#failurefriday #creativecoding #generativeart #squares #blackandwhite #lines #creativecodeart
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