Cruise ship sinks Venezuelan patrol boat, well done

Play with the bull, you get the horns.

A little more info about the incident, including what may have been the background reasons:

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zo...amming-a-cruise-liner-with-an-reinforced-hull (no pay wall)

Mind boggling...

Saw a documentary this week on how the Queen Mary split a naval escort ship in 2, everyone onboard the QM said they never even felt it! Interesting that the naval ship was named HMS Curaçao.

http://ww2today.com/2nd-october-1942-troopship-liner-queen-mary-sinks-hms-curacoa

The QM was in U-boat waters and would run a zig zag course change every 15 minutes , could not stop as they were transporting troops, had to run a few trips with a stubbed bow.

https://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/mighty-ship-at-war-queen-mary/0/3436505

Well done indeed !!! RCGS Resolute is the former Hapag-Lloyd Cruise Ship Hanseatic built by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg. This cruise ship is still holding the record for comming closest to the North Pole with passengers ever. And she was purposely made for that kind of vojages. My wife and I made a cruise on her to Jan Mayen, when she was still named Hanseatic. Great memories.

Lessons learned for stupid communists: Do not mess with "Made in Germany".

Every Navy commander in the world (even the Russian Navy) has an edition of Jane's all the world merchant ships in his nav room book shelf. To bad the Venezuelan Navy has officers that seem to be unable to read books.
Highest Ice Class means very strong ship Amigo.

And cruise ships have voyage recorders and bridge voice and radio recorders, as mandated by IMO and SOLAS. Will be an easy proof for the skipper of this imperialistic cruise ship.

This case will for sure come to the International Maritime Court in Hamburg. I promise, I will be in the auditorium and LMAO !

Really good news in bad times.

Venezuela has more Admirals and Generals than the US:

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-...enezuelas-beleaguered-president-idUSKCN1TT1O4

I lived and skippered in Venezuela for many years, both yachts and commercial boats. Their military is terrible, run by a bunch of idiots with good family ties.

Not surprised in the slightest.

Attached two more pictures of this "heavily armed and armoured imperialistic battle ship" from her glorious times under the Hapag-Lloyd colours. At her time, she was the only 5-star explorer cruis ship in the world.





RCGS RESOLUTE is operated by a German Company and is flying the Portuguese Flag. Maduro has a little private dispute with Portugal about supporting the opposition leader of Venezuela and most of all accuses Portugal of having confiscated Venezuelean assets (they have frozen some of his personal bank accounts due to the US embargo against Venezuela). This attack was obviously a planned attempt to take a portoguese ship and its crew as hostages. Nice try but no cigar.

That is what the free world calls piracy. Maduros Navy officers must be a real bunch of amateurs. I am pretty sure, the US Navy will take care of the rest of the Venzuelean Navy in the very near future, as a US fleet is already on its way (to stop the Venezuelean government supported drug smuggling to the US).

If anybody meets the skipper of RCGS Resolute, buy him a beer for his victory.

Based also on some reconstructions of the accidents that were published in the meantime, I don't think there's a lot that the Resolute Captain did to deserve that beer - if anything at all.
Rather a case of the Patrol Boat Capt. deserving a Darwin award, me think.

Regardless, it's unlikely that in the near future there will be a long queue of buyers, outside Navantia shipyard.
I mean, arm wrestling with a vessel whose displacement is almost five times larger was a game lost from the outset, hence the Darwin award.
But capsizing the patrol boat with not much more than paint scratches... Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!?

The beer is just for not following the order of this navy commander. No half way reasonable skipper of a merchant ship would enter an active fight with an armed warship. A 76 mm Otto Melara and a 30 mm automated cannon are some arguments.

But as far as I know from my maritime (and Navy) background, if a war ship is starting positve action, the ship is called to battle station. This includes the closure of the watertight bulkheads. The patrol boat obviously got some severe damage on its forward collision bulkhead, when hitting the pretty solid bulbuous bow of this ice breaker type cruise ship. And with open bulkheads behind the CB, the damaged stability went down to NIL in minutes.

And I agree with You mapism, not a very good advertisement for the Spanish Navantia Shipyard. This Corvette was only good for parades and with this crew, not even for that purpose.

1 : 0 for the cruise ship. If I would be the captain of that cruise ship, I would paint the sunken war ship on my funnel.

At least nobody was harmed or killed. Everybody got home safely to recieve the blame. They deserve it.

bulbuous bow ??

I'm confused;
Would an ice ship have a bulbuous bow? Big projection from the stem, under water?
Seems it would catch the ice instead of riding up and over the ice as I see it's pointed bow would do so.

I wonder if the stiletto bow got a poke into the navy boat and cracked it like an oyster.

Yes it has a bulbous bow. If You look at one of norseman's pictures, You can see the shadow of the bulb in the water. It cuts the ice above the bulb and the bulb pushes it away. Unfortunately (for the war ship) this bulb is constructed in such a massive way, it must have sliced through the skin of the corvette like butter.

A professional ice breaker of course hase a different type of bow. He cuts the ice up to a certain thickness and above that he goes up the ice and breaks it by his sheer weight.

Ice classed merchant ships only cut through the ice up to a certain thickness according to their ice class unless really build for breaking thick ice. We had one cargo vessel specially build for the baltic trade. It could break ice up to 3 ft solid thickness on forward motion. When the ice got thicker, the ship had to turn around and drive backwards through the ice. It even had a rear facing second bridge. The stern was a purpose built ice breaker bow and the very strong prop below the bow was designed to cut the broken ice into pieces and force it under the ships belly and outboard. This opened an ice free canal for other vessels to follow. Worked perfect. It was used in the very eastern baltic sea, where the Finnish ice breakers where waiting for the convoys of normal cargo ship led by one of those special designed ship.

In the eastern baltic, solid ice is not the biggest problem, its packed ice. That stuff needs real ice breakers to deal with.

The problem for this type of cruise ships is not the solid ice. Their problem is submerged floating pieces of ice. That's the reason for this massive bulbous bow. He just rams it away.

I remember our Jan Mayen Cruise going through drifting ice. Pretty noisy part of the cruise, even when only going about 5 to 6 Kts. But the best food and comfort, we ever had on a cruise ship. After 14 days of cruise, you had gained many new friends and a lot more body weight . The MS Hanseatic had a crew to passenger ratio of almost 1 : 1. Five meals a day and any time you opened your hand, you had a new drink in it.

I think Norseman could live on one of those ships. But after one year, he would look like Jabba the Hutt .

A question for those more knowledgeable. I note the Venezuelan ship was built as a Stealth class Littoral patrol vessel. The Norwegians lost a slightly larger stealth Frigate after a collision with a small tanker. Is there something about the material and design choices and compromises that make Stealth class ships more vulnerable in collision situations and by extension was the Venezuelan commander executing a maneuver which he should have known his ship was not designed or constructed to do?

The two ships were of different Naval Class designs so hard to compare them;

The Norwegian Ship use a parent Spanish F-100 Design: https://www.navantia.es/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/F100-5.pdf

The mystery with the Norwegian sinking is that is was supposed to have sufficient separated compartments to withstand the hull penetration, but they found that multiple compartments had flooded. The Norwegian crew was also not highly rated. These are real Frigate Naval vessels at displacements over 5,000 tons.

https://www.defensenews.com/naval/2...y-shortfalls-in-the-runup-to-frigate-sinking/

The Venezuela Naval Ship also used a Spanish Navy parent craft design but was not a Frigate, but a light Offshore Patrol Vessel at 1500 tons. https://www.naval-technology.com/projects/bvl-guaicamacuto-class-offshore-patrol-vessels/

The Venezuelan Captain had potentially watched too many episodes of the Fast and the Furious and didn't realize that all those stunts where all CGI

Thanks I also read that on a sister ship an attempt to test the ship's gun killed one sailor and injured 6. This is a Keystone Navy methinks.