Sunk in 1564: the Swedish Battleship Mars Rediscovered!

[Matchlock]

Hi there,


My dear and brilliant friend Armin König has just sent me this link:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/n...nt&sf3597260=1

You will remember me crediting Armin on various occasions, and in about 10 of my threads:
http://www.vikingsword.com/vb/search...earchid=415831
http://www.engerisser.de/Bewaffnung/.../Firearms.html

Among other things, he is well known for building the finest ever quality copies of earliest handgonnes, as well as of matchlock and wheellock arsenal firearms - all of them handcrafted exactly after fine original guns held by important international museums, and The Michael Trömner Collection.
With all his guns, Armin allows not one single millimeter of difference in all their measurements, and just a few grams of weight by the höchstens when compared to the data he takes from the original specimens!
Of course they are officially blackpowder proofed, and made to hit their target at least as reliably as the originals 600 to 400 years ago. Some of his customers, from New Zealand to Denmark and Czechia, proudly and successfully even employ Armin's guns at shooting competitions - and they are winners.
Although Armin is far too modest to accept my calling him a genius, in fact HE IS.

Let's get back to the subject of this thread, though.

I have just registered with NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC, so saved all the information provided there on vikingsword.com:


Cursed Warship Revealed With Treasure Onboard

Researchers and divers have started studying the secrets the Mars, the pride of Sweden's 16th-century navy, has held for 450 years.


The Mars lies at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, where it sank during a naval battle in 1564. A diver at upper right provides scale.


COMPOSITE PHOTOGRAPH BY TOMASZ STACHURA, OCEAN DISCOVERY



Jane J. Lee

National Geographic

Published July 7, 2014

It was the largest and fiercest warship in the world, named the Mars for the Roman god of war, but it went up in a ball of flames in a brutal naval battle in 1564, consigning 800 to 900 Swedish and German sailors and a fortune in gold and silver coins to the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

Now, a few years after the ship's discovery, researchers have concluded that the one-of-a-kind ship is also the best preserved ship of its kind, representing the first generation of Europe's big, three-masted warships.

Naval historians know a lot about 17th-century ships, but very little about warships from the 16th century, said Johan Rönnby, a professor of maritime archaeology at Södertörn University in Sweden, who is studying the 197-foot-long (60 meter) wreck.

"It's a missing link," said Rönnby, whose work is funded in part by a grant from the National Geographic Society's Global Exploration Fund. The 1500s is an important period, he said, because it's when big three-masted warships started being built.

Researchers have found cargo from early warships called galleons—slightly later iterations of the type of vessel the Mars exemplifies. And they've recovered pieces of actual ships, including the English flagship Mary Rose, which sank during a battle in 1545. But never have they found something as well preserved as the Mars.

Rönnby and his team want to leave the Mars on the seafloor and instead use three-dimensional scans and photographs to share the wreck with the world.

Rönnby, with help from Richard Lundgren—part owner of Ocean Discovery, a company of professional divers that assists in maritime archaeology work—and others, has been piecing together photomosaics and scanning the wreck to produce 3-D reconstructions. With funding from the National Geographic Society/Waitt Grants Program, they are working this summer to complete their scans of the entire ship.

Bringing a ship out of the ocean is expensive, and it can cause significant harm to artifacts. The laser scans Lundgren and colleagues have taken are accurate to within 0.08 inches (2 millimeters)—more than enough to satisfy most researchers.

Using some relatively new tools and methods, archeologists now have a chance to reconstruct the last minutes of the ship and the souls onboard, Lundgren said, and gain some insight into how people behaved on a battlefield.




Best to everybody out there
from a fine Lower Bavarian summer midnight -
and from Michael:

glad to be finally back home again this summer, after spending the last two years in hospitals,
tipping a pint of dark Abensberg beer to all of you,
and imagining all those beautiful mid 16th century arquebuses that wreck has been preserving for 450 years!
I'm dreaming myself back to those days wishing those arquebuses were mine - and Armin was rebuilding all of them, just for the fun of it!


Attached below find just a small selection of all the guns Armin has built - that guy is unbelievable.
In the attachment at the bottom, note his cute and cool tomcat Heinrich admiring the Thirty Years War musketeer's figurene!