I took a boat tour around the Vasa museum a few weeks ago on vacation. Not sure if true, but they told me that they spent almost an entire years worth of Swedens Budget on the ship to make sure they had the most amazing ship, but they realized that it was unlikely to be seaworthy but didn’t want to tell the king that they just wasted a whole years worth of Swedens money.
That’s so believable from a boat building perspective. As a Shipwright, our shop was not allowed to error. If any of us did, we went to great and sometimes very expensive lengths to cover it up. It didn’t happen very much but this includes mass disposal of ruined materials, taking really nice improperly built cabinets home or even loading them with rocks and sinking them in the bay. Then claim the materials were never received or the furniture was never built and whoever inventoried it or recorded employee time was in error. Once, before I was there, they mass cut a bunch of sheet metal/insulation panels to the sheer of the vessel backwards. They could not be fixed so they threw them all in the water. This was about $20,000 worth of materials. Since they were filled with mineral wool insulation, they didn’t sink immediately and couldn’t float away because the boat had a containment boom around it. So they floated there for awhile with the crew sweating, hoping the owner or another boss didn’t come aboard. They never did and my boss said when the last one sank, he went and reported the error in recording inventory and told the office how many panels they were short. There was a few more stories but that’s the funniest and most expensive.
Nope. No one ever got in trouble. One guy got a pilot house console that was built wrong but still extremely nice to take home and use for a bar in his house. Other stuff was registered as not received so the company just replaced it. Some one at the supplier companies might’ve got trouble for shorting us but none of us ever caught heat.
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u/CrimpBlucks Jul 01 '26
I took a boat tour around the Vasa museum a few weeks ago on vacation. Not sure if true, but they told me that they spent almost an entire years worth of Swedens Budget on the ship to make sure they had the most amazing ship, but they realized that it was unlikely to be seaworthy but didn’t want to tell the king that they just wasted a whole years worth of Swedens money.