The Swedish warship Vasa

The Swedish warship Vasa. It sank in 1628 less than a mile into its maiden voyage and was recovered from the sea floor after 333 years almost completely intact. Now housed at the Vasa Museum in Stockholm, is the world's best preserved 17th century ship.

My wife Manju and I visited Vasa Museum in 2014 when we traveled to  Stockholm. We loved this ship’s origin/history. What the picture angle doesn’t allow you to see is the massive scale of this behemoth; As a general reference, each of those figures you see carved on the ship are life sized. But the reason it sank is even more mind blowing IMO, the man who funded the build of the ship just wanted it to be as big and ornate as possible on a fast timeline so the shipbuilder simply scaled a drawing of a standard large ship commonly built and did t account for the change in the center of mass, thus the buoyancy would fail due to a toppling effect from being too heavy. Even crazier, knowing this, the ship was still designed with al of the excess carvings you see worsening the effect. By the time it was completed, it was well known it wasn’t sea-worthy and had even failed some tests but the city was just like “Poland just declared war and this thing is taking up the entire harbor so I guess just go ahead and get it out of here” and so they tried and it of course immediately was rocked by gentle wind and then capsized not even two nautical miles from the launch, sinking in the harbor and taking over 50 lives.