The Stupidest Warship (Not Kuznetsov) (360p)

Cruise ships. Ocean liners. Big floaty passenger thingies. Whatever you want to call them, they have a storied history. And no, I'm not talking about the Titanic. There's more to life than the bloody Titanic. Read a book and stop being pretentious about a midship that has nothing on its big sister you know absolutely nothing about. Because all you've based your perception on and your whole personality on is the bloody James Cameron movie. Most people won't know who I'm talking to here and think that I'm just ranting when that little last bit there, but I guarantee there'll be at least one Gen X in the comments who screams at me for insulting them over that. And you deserve it. Get a better personality. But passenger ships. They're cool. Very cool. Personally I favour the Lusitania. I think it might be the best one ever built. But my true favourite passenger ship, by far, is the Olympic. The forgotten sister of the Titanic, transporter of entire divisions in the First World War, and one evening so angry it ran down and cut a submarine in half because the Olympic did not have time for the German Navy and their underwater crap. See that's the cool thing about these ships. They don't have weapons most of the time. Sometimes though, they are the weapon. Be it Olympic driving headfirst into a submarine, or HMS Jarvis Bay with a pop gun driving into a German 11-inch battery running on sheer anger and adrenaline alone. These ships are brilliant. Parts of nautical history. Parts of all of our nation's history, whether we come from the United States, Australia, Britain, basically wherever you come from, even if it's an inland national lake in Africa. I guarantee, exception of maybe Switzerland and, you know, insert Central Asian country here that I can't think of right now, you've been affected in some way in your national history by a passenger ship. But that's all the past, right? You know, passenger ships going out, ramming other ships, doing things crazy. That's all in the past. This is all history. What if I told you it wasn't? What if I told you passenger ships are still out there being absolute menaces when they want to be, and even sinking warships? Our next story totally does not, weirdly I know, take place in Russia. Rather, keeping with my recent cow video, we are off to Latin America. This time to Venezuela. Rather the Bolivian Republic of Venezuela, under the reign of El Jefe Hugo Chavez. Back in 2005, the Venezuelans realized after a bit of a look about that they needed to update the patrol wing of their coast guard. Because to be honest, the existing ships were getting a bit long on the tooth. Now about this time, we began to see a resurgence in Spanish shipbuilding, specifically from Navantia, when it comes to export, be it the smaller ships, but they also responsible for the hulls of the new Australian helicopter assault carriers. We use Spanish rig designs in Australia now too, for destroyers. I say frigate and destroyer, the Spanish ones are destroyers too, they just call them frigates, because Europeans like to call destroyers frigates because it sounds less threatening. But make no mistake, they carry the weaponry of an Elly Burke. Turkish assault ships as well, and just in general, Navantia is absolutely cooking when it comes to shipbuilding. They are one of the premier shipbuilders in the modern naval space. So when the Venezuelans went looking, they saw the designs of Navantia, and well, they wanted a piece of the action. Navantia had a fair few hurdles to deal with though, because quite frankly, Venezuela is not exactly hermanos with the United States, and by proxy, its relationship with NATO is, well, a bit tenuous. But that's no matter, because the Venezuelans, they had a plan. Bribery. And the Spanish shipbuilding magnets and politicians in their way effectively responded to their plan with, hello, I like money. This got the ball rolling, and the, that word, was launched three years later in 2008. A second ship followed a year later, and then a third ship, Neguata, joined the Venezuelan Navy in 2011. There was a fourth ship in the class, but it was built in Venezuela and not in Spain, with her sisters. There is still an active investigation surrounding the ships and their construction, but suffice to say, the Venezuelans paid over 40 million euros to the right people to get these ships in the water, which makes what happens to one of them even funnier. The Neguata, by all accounts, is actually a reasonably well-armed ship. She was, we'll get into that. She was 79.9 meters long, 11.8 meters wide, and had a draft of about seven meters. Propelled by four MTU diesel engines, the ship could motor along at about 22 knots, with a cruising speed of about 16 knots, to a range of 4,000 nautical miles. The complement aboard was supposed to be around 34 to 36 sailors, and she even had the facilities on board for a helicopter. On this hull, the ship was armed with a 76 millimeter main battery gun, a 35 millimeter secondary weapon, and two close-in 50 caliber machine guns. All in all, this isn't the USS Iowa, but for a Coast Guard Littoral Combat Boat, she's actually really strong. Some would say quite overgunned, in some senses, with that 76 millimeter main gun, but either way. In the blue corner, though, we have the Finnish-built, German-designed, Royal Canadian Geographical Society-linked, Portuguese flag, say that 10 times, RCGS Resolute. Resolute is a 124.8 meter long cruise ship, designed specifically for the upmarket cruise industry in colder climates. The ship has six passenger decks, with space for 184 passengers and 125 crew. Now, by standards of day, she isn't a large cruise ship when you compare her to something like the RMS Queen Mary II, or the Oasis of the Seas, although I would call the Oasis of the Seas a floating biohazard, but either way, she isn't small. Resolute weighed in at about 5,892 tons over twice the displacement of the Venezuelan patrol boat, and she can sail along at an economical 16 knots. Now, while this seems slow, there is a reason for it. See, the Resolute was designed to extremely high standards, for ice voyages. Keep that little nugget in your brain. Upon completion, the ship was immediately laid up after the cancellation of her sister ship, and it seemed like due to financial troubles that nobody would take her, and she would be destined for the scrap heap, or some other ignominious end or role. After some time she laid up, she was visited by a handful of prospective buyers, including, believe it or not, Donald Trump. Guess he needed another way to get... I'm not finishing that sentence. Yeah, small world. But in 1993 she found a home with Hanseatic Tours, and was named Hanseatic. It was with Hanseatic that she actually broke the record for transiting the Northwest Passage and going further north than any other passenger carrying ship. This quaint existence changed in 2017 though, after Hanseatic went belly up, and the ship found itself again without a home. The Canadian company One Ocean Expeditions saw the ship for sale, and grabbed it up, renaming her to RCGS Resolute after an 1850s Royal Navy exploration vessel, registered her under a Portuguese flag so they didn't have to pay the crews too much money, and well from there things didn't really go well, with there being a massive falling out with the company's Russian partner, who shockingly weren't reliable, and significant fees began to go unpaid, leaving the ship and company in debt, and the ship actually stuck in of all places Buenos Aires, where she was nearly repossessed. It was here in June 2020 that the Resolute set out from Argentina to Curacao to find a buyer, to try and pay off the company's nearly now 4 million dollar debt. After the absolute whiplash that was the Resolute and its existence, since the folding of Hanseatic, the ship's engines and systems were getting a bit dated. So on her voyage from Buenos Aires to Curacao, she encountered a fair few issues that would require the 32 crew aboard to stop the ship and carry out maintenance, to get the ship running. Now this was undertaken about 13.3 nautical miles from the Isla de Tortuga. It was at this moment, while the ship was adrift, that she would be contacted by a warship of the Venezuelan Navy, nominally belonging to the Coast Guard. The Venezuelan ship identified itself as the Nalgaita, and asserted that the Resolute was within the Venezuelan economic exclusion zone, and due to its suspicious activity, they were now being ordered to follow the warship to Puerto Moreno on the Isla de Margarita. Clearly the captain of the Venezuelan ship had sipped on a few too many margaritas himself, because the Resolute was well and truly in international waters. The crew of the Resolute knew that the ship was in the right, and in international waters, and so they turned around and said, no we're not sailing to Curacao, leave us alone, or something similar to the effect, you get the idea. Now the Venezuelans decided next to do quite possibly the stupidest thing you can imagine, and unless you know the story, well it's hard to guess just how moronically stupid it's going to be. I'm talking something so stupid that the Russian Navy might want to start taking notes, because this is something I don't even think they're stupid enough to do. Firstly, the warship moved to the right, or starboard side of the cruise ship, and fired off a couple warning shots. When the Resolute turned around and said, understandably, but what the eff are you doing, part two of the superbly genius Venezuelan plan was put into effect. See if the Resolute was refusing to follow them into Venezuelan waters, what if they just like, got forced into them? I mean, you know, they float into Venezuelan waters, oh no, we can now board them, oh look at that. So employing the power of their genius, so immense it quite literally moved gravity. The Naugaita turned on the speed, and ran into the Resolute repeatedly to try and nudge it towards Venezuela. I don't mean they hit it once or twice, I mean no, they kept bonking the Resolute to push it. Now the astute among you may have remembered when I pointed out and told you to keep this little nugget in your brain, the size difference of these two vessels. This is the equivalent of trying to move a dump truck by running a Toyota Corolla into it. Now one thing the almost 2,000 ton warship didn't realise about the 8,300 ton cruise ship, was that she was, as I pointed out, ice rated. She was designed with an ice breaker bow, to break pack ice. So after one particular, you know, vigorous ram, the Naugaita just simply cracked and started filling with water extremely quickly. The Resolute was probably laughing, tried to contact the warship, effectively asking them, are you done yet? Do you want to get picked up? And the Venezuelans left them on read, and began evacuating their ship. And you know what, more power to them, it's that embarrassing, you wouldn't really want to get saved by that ship anyway, would you? The Resolute's crew, likely at severe risk of death from extreme laughter, brought about by the comedy show on display from the Venezuelan Navy's supposed warship, that had barely dented the Resolute, yeah I mean that by barely dented, this was the result of the ramming, stayed on the site for at least an hour, contacting authorities and offering to try and help. The Venezuelan warship, and I keep saying warship, it's part of the Coast Guard, but nominally it's still a warship. Now doing it's best Russian Black Sea Fleet impression was going down, but the sailors aboard refused help. Not wanting to deal with a repeated situation, likely fearing that the Resolute could sink the entire Navy, should it come to it, because it chose violence, the Resolute retired and continued on it's voyage where it would be sold, for a If the extremely corrupt ship that sank itself by banging it's head into a wall wasn't enough to make you laugh, it just gets better, because the Venezuelan reaction to this event was well, again, you'll see. The first thing the Venezuelans did was maintain that the ship was inside their territorial waters, and when everyone laughed at them, because GPS exists, they went to the next logical step by saying that the ship was actually a secret plot by According to Defence Minister Vladimir Lopez, the Resolute was being escorted. Being escorted, it, the cruise ship, decided to ram the Bolivarian Navy ship, which caused it's sinking. The minister noted this, and then he later accused the Resolute of a as the ship did not attempt to rescue the crew, referring to the fact that the Resolute apparently did not try and rescue the Venezuelan sailors, which it tried to for about an hour. Eventually, the Venezuelan crew were rescued by the compatriots, and for some reason, the patrol boat had a fair few men aboard than she was actually designed for, see, like, I'm talking like it had an extra quarter of it's crew aboard. Not entirely sure why, my first thought was maybe it had some cadets aboard, but I got no idea. Because the cruise ship was a Portuguese flagged vessel, an investigation was conducted by the very official sounding office for the investigation of maritime accidents and the aeronautical meteorology authority. No, I will not be attempting to pronounce the Portuguese version of this agency. I saw it written, and I know better. Venezuela wasn't done yet, mind you, after everyone collected themselves from the comedy show that was the mercenary's story, the ship's owners, and those deemed responsible by the government of Venezuela were served with lawsuits, the country trying to recoup the loss and offload some of the blame, and you'll be very happy to know that everyone who's received one of these lawsuits, for the most part, has laughed at it and thrown it away. To this date, I have not seen anything that anyone from Venezuela has received money for their stupid, stupid moment. Today, the Resolute has been renamed to the Heritage Adventurer. Turns out that selling in Curacao was probably the best thing that could have happened to it. She's been given a lovely new coat of paint and a full refit. She now applies her trade as intended and is enjoying a very long career. It is my heartbreaking news to tell you that there is no sticker near the bridgewing that shows her kill, but if you ever do book passage on the Heritage Adventurer, just remember that one night in the 2020s where she channeled the energy of her ancestors and she chose violence. Like, comment, subscribe, and I will catch you all next time. Before I end, little PSA, you can click off if you don't care, I'm looking at changing the way the channel works, looking at starting each month with a big video and then doing one smaller video. You'll get about the same amount of content but it'll let me actually do deep dives into particular topics and then a smaller video sort of tacked on at the end of the month just to, you know, satisfy YouTube's algorithm gods. Currently I try and do three videos a month at least, one at the start, one in the middle, one at the end. This would have been about a week ago but I decided to go and get food poisoning because I'm a genius. So yeah, I'm looking at trialing that for a bit, just doing one really large video at the start of the month, be it 50 minutes to an hour long, about a deep dive into a topic. I think my top one right now that I'm working on is the Indian partition. Could be that, could be one other one, I'm not entirely sure. I've got about seven or eight scripts in the work and then another video at the end of the month. All will be explained as to why I'm doing that and what will be in the middle of the month in the future. I've got a big project underway at the moment and I'm really excited to show and tell you all, but I can't yet because it's a surprise, so just wait and watch. But yeah, if you want to comment on that and tell me what think about that new kind of scheduling, let me know and I will catch you all next time. Bye.