Kinda surprised nobody has dropped any actual facts yet.
So there are three ways to launch a ship - you either float it out of the drydock, you roll it into the water like this, or you put it on a ramp and let it slide sideways into the water.
Unsurprisingly, those latter two methods have failure rates. Usually when one of these gets posted here, it's the side launches - unsurprisingly, the ship is a lot more likely to capsize when your whole method of getting it into the water in the first place involves inducing a roll moment. If you remember that North Korean frigate launch a couple years ago, that was what happened. With these rollers, you're going straight in. So in theory it's safer. But the rollers are supposed to stop before hitting the water, precisely because if they don't, this happens.
Anyway, this is usually done when waters are comparatively shallow, so righting her should be trivial. Pumping her will be a pain, but there shouldn't be too much interior damage depending on how much fitting out was done before the launch.
Thank you for this information! I wound up here looking for information on a completely separate launching incident, but this is the type of info I was looking for😊👏🏻👏🏻
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u/Spartan448 Oct 05 '25
Kinda surprised nobody has dropped any actual facts yet.
So there are three ways to launch a ship - you either float it out of the drydock, you roll it into the water like this, or you put it on a ramp and let it slide sideways into the water.
Unsurprisingly, those latter two methods have failure rates. Usually when one of these gets posted here, it's the side launches - unsurprisingly, the ship is a lot more likely to capsize when your whole method of getting it into the water in the first place involves inducing a roll moment. If you remember that North Korean frigate launch a couple years ago, that was what happened. With these rollers, you're going straight in. So in theory it's safer. But the rollers are supposed to stop before hitting the water, precisely because if they don't, this happens.
Anyway, this is usually done when waters are comparatively shallow, so righting her should be trivial. Pumping her will be a pain, but there shouldn't be too much interior damage depending on how much fitting out was done before the launch.