Age of Sail Gunnery – Letalitatea așchiilor (ft. Vasa)

42 thoughts on “Age of Sail Gunnery – Letalitatea așchiilor (ft. Vasa)”

1. Pinned post for Q&A 🙂

2. Hard to believe that anybody survived a full on naval engagement. Particularly considering the ease at which even a small wound could eventually kill you by infection.

3. I love the information the curator gave!
   All around great video!

4. Infection risk is why the smart sailers put on clean clothes before battle. Clean cloth penetrating wounds doesn't cause infection like filthy dirty clothing. It must be true, I saw it on a TV documentary 🤪😜🙃

5. and to think a hawthorn thorn through the webbing of my 2nd and third finger on my hand only to pass out my wrist a few days later made me whine sheesh.

6. how accurate was the splinter scene in the pirates of the caribbean: at world's end? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_54IUIv97nI

7. No antibiotics either. Poor boys.

8. A handsome version of U.S. Grant.

9. What an informative video! I've been fan of the Age of Sail since my high school years when I read "A Short History of the United States Navy." That book was published by the thousands over the course of several decades. It was originally written about 1910 to be the naval history textbook for the U.S. Naval Academy. It had a few updated revisions, the last being sometime in the late 1920s or early 1930s. The authors took ship log accounts of battles and any other sources extant to compile maps of ship-to-ship encounters to accompany the written text, so it is easier to imagine the actual ship movements from before the first shot until the winner draws away to make her own repairs before taking over the ship that struck her colors. Searching on the title will find any number of copies for sale at reasonable prices, most in very good condition or better. It's like having an expert like the gentleman from the Vasa museum, or Drach himself, at your fingertips, covering the successes and failures of both sides in a number of encounters. The sections from the Barbary Coast war, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the US Civil War piqued my imagination so much that over the years I have owned and/or given away four different revisions, the most recent one to my great-grandson.

10. Great video thank you

11. I've read that the term for shipboard wooden splinter damage, in the course of battle, was called "Hull Burst" (the last time I posted a reference link I got in trouble with YouTube for some reason so I will refrain from that )

12. I was lucky enough to do the on-board tour of the USS Constitution in Boston in 2018. WOW… this ship is beautiful. And the fire power is quite confronting. Touring one of these old ships certainly gives you an idea of the conditions and what must have been going through the sailers minds as they sailed into battle.

13. The test on mythbusters was scalled down. The wood was also not stressed. A wood beam on a ship might have multiple tons of weight, twist and bend on it from the movment and weight of the ship. So even a small gun could cause much greater damage because the timber would explode more violently.

14. In an age before antibiotics… being penetrated by wooden splinters – even relatively superficial wounds would be potentially lethal.
    Clean metal fragments are almost sterile… having been heated by the propellant charge, the burst charge (if it is an explosive shell) and the kinetic energy needed to sheer fragments off of a homogeneous piece of metal. (Tearing metal to produce fragments will cause the pices to be quite hot… hot enough to burn one's skin if handled directly after the pieces are produced. )

    The wooden fragments of a ships timbers by comparison are a frigging ZOO of various organisms… many of which can infect a living host.

    They didn't culture the wood fragments on myth busters. That's what's kill you. Not the wound, the infection from having a porus, jagged chunk of cellulose (and everything living on it) shoved into your body

    I'll take higher velocity metal shrapnel every day and twice on Sundays before getting fragged with ship timbers, if penicillin or sulfa drugs aren't available. Just sayin'

15. The problem with all injuries was infection. Infection led to amputation and that killed more than it saved.

16. Another problem is that even a cannonball fired against a heavy planked ship that doesn't go through could still splinter planks on the in side.

17. Wait they had supersonic cannons???? How have i never learned about this before

18. FISHER 😊❤

19. Fascinating. Appeared in my feed, thoroughly enjoyed it, thank you 👍😊. Also, gets a sub from me.

20. I wonder if Adam Savage has seen this video. I would be curious on his thoughts regarding revisiting the mythbusters test.

21. This presentation is awesome.

22. 16:45 it took you way to long to come to that point 😅

23. "splinters arent that bad" mfs after being hit by a 2000km/s wooden projectile

24. The Ships used to have up to 32 pounders on a Ship of the line back then

25. Kinda surprised you didnt reference Trollope and how in 1 broadside he erased the entire upper deck of a french vessel resulting in its immediate surrender both because the french capt saw a 64lb ball and assumed he was fighting a SoL and because everyone gundeck and above was wounded/dead from splinters caused by the double shot carronade salvo and thus we have HMS Trincomalee

26. Wood splinters would be much worse than metal. Because it would more often be multiple huge pieces, metal shards would be small, and fewer. Metal doesn't fragment easily. A shell can go right through a metal hull and leave a huge hole with little or no fragmented shards coming off. The shell itself may explode and that shrapnel would cause injuries. But metal splinters from the ship would be a minor concern compared to wooden ships where it would be a major source of injuries.

27. I don’t often leave YouTube comments but my mind is genuinely blown. What an interesting educational video. Thank you.

28. I just don’t accept the “Splinter” theories, while conceding there would have been some splinters, I don’t accept their commonly held prolific spread in naval warfare. I base this on observing the effect of gunfire on wood, both green unseasoned and seasoned timber. True, many of the shots I’ve observed would have far greater velocity than those of muzzle loading cannon, but some were ricochets and were as slow or slower than cannon fire.

29. The other portion of splinter injuries had a lot to do with the type and condition of the wood. And of course what section of structure is hit. Harder woods are more prone to sharper splinters. Some strikes would produce a cloud of "shavings" with little particle mass. Others produced splinters as big as javelins. There are few comparisons that can be made between the energy on a 6-pound ball compared to an 18 or heavier. The ship surgeons of the age of sail warfare, were the ones who wrote up the reports that come down to us. Splinter injuries were a real and difficult to treat problem. No "debunker" can prove otherwise without a 100% accurate replication of the weapon and the ship structure.

30. Dad's friend passed away from a flying chunk of bark to the throat from an improperly felled tree splitting and kicking back big splinters…it went straight through….don't knock nature….

31. One’s proximity to the ball’s explosive damage is key. Smaller splinters will lose energy closer than the big ones but all fairly close.

32. Even though the link I'm putting isn't about splinters and shows a bowling ball rather than a cannon ball, it's interesting (and terrifying) to see the damage done if a cannon ball were to hit a person.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycjblUbiflA

33. This kicks ass Thank you from America.

34. My brother almost died from a single splinter in his hand that he got while working. That night, he woke up from pain in his arm, and he noticed his veins were black up to his elbow. He went to the hospital to find out he had a blood infection. The doctor said that if he didn't wake up from the pain, he would've died. The infection was that fast! I think most of the deaths by splinters in the age of sailing was caused by the infections it caused. Metal splinters don't seem to infect as much.

35. Myth Busters are proven frauds

36. ? What i dont understand is this. Why should i trust a randomcommenter doubting the claims of a verry real sailor aboard a verry real big wooden ship with lots of verry real verry big guns? I think the people aboard those ships would probably know what they are talking about considering the amount of info out there BESIDES one random tv shows experiment.

37. See too Bastogne, etc etc

38. The muzzle flash/jet of flame is less when actually firing a projectile compared to just firing a blank charge… so Master and Commander is accurate even in that regard

39. i remember watching that MythBusters episode on TV back in the day and being very disappointed by that particular test

40. tldr; Splinters = wooden shrapnel. The rest is as you'd expect.

41. Shiver me timbers!

42. The MythBusters test is liberal logic and liberal science in action. Don't expect it to work, don't expect it to make sense. It's perfectly sensible to the liberal, of course.

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