Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 164 posts

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#41

Post by cov1dnineteen »

ck2 wrote: post #16

World is going to become even more scary. Imagine what is happening inside North Korea we will never hear about. The population will be quietly cut in half. Putin has been doing some (more) scary things in Russia while no-one outside is paying attention. I'm still not completely convinced we are going to be allowed to have elections in November.

> Imagine what is happening inside North Korea

North Korea has no cases of COVID-19.

That number isn't real you say? Well, if we're going to start questioning the numbers we might find ourselves looking hard at China's highly improbable figures. And that would jeopardize a whole basket of important narratives.

Can't have that.

> I'm still not completely convinced we are going to be allowed to have elections in November.

Patience for this has an expiration. I don't know when that is but I know it's measured in weeks, not months. There are a bunch of power elite with assured futures that are unaware of the distress and ruin they're causing. The backlash is coming.

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#42

Post by FireBeyond »

elorant wrote: post #36
battery_cowboy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those shells will do nothing to stop the ship but will just kill a lot of people for no gains. If they wanted to seize the ship, they should have brought a boarding party with them, I'm sure they have trained sailors for that. Source: I'm a former naval officer and I served as an ordnance officer on a ship with that exact 76mm gun. I also acted as the officer of the deck for quite a few boardings.

So how do you stop a cruiser like that?

With a boarding party via helicopter or specialized boarding craft (fast boats and rapeling?).

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#43

Post by duxup »

jandrese wrote: post #24
hirundo wrote: post #21

The Venezuelan ship had a 76mm gun, maybe one like this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTO_Melara_76_mm Why would you ram when you could shoot up the other ship with 85 to 120 fourteen pound shells per minute, with no risk to your own ship? Maybe they didn't actually have the ammo. Or maybe they decided to play chicken with the cruise ship and lost.

They weren't trying to sink the cruise ship, they were trying to turn their tiny destroyer into a tugboat and push the cruise ship into a port where it could be seized.

Doesn't seem like they would likely be able to maintain control of a ship like that enough to really force some small directional changes each collision.

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#44

Post by duxup »

malcolmwhite wrote: post #40

Trump recently announced we are doubling the size of southern command and dramatically increasing our activity off the coast of Venezuela, where this occurred. Could the cruise ship have been doing something sneaky?

Would they need a cruise ship to do a thing?

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#45

Post by duxup »

sudoaza wrote: post #37
analognoise wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US wanted to invade, apparently we could do it with a handful of cruise ships. Why send carriers when Carnival will do?

Not what I meant. Could be there as an excuse loaded with drugs so the navy then can move in. Iraq was invaded under the false pretence of the weapons of mass destruction which didn't exist and UN observers proved so 1 week before Invasion. Panama was invaded under the excuse of drug war. Planting drugs to justify the invasion wouldn't be much of a stretch. Pretty bad luck that 1 of 3 reinforced cruise just drifts to…

Except in your examples nobody needed to stage something like a cruise ship stuffed with drugs, they just made their case and did whatever.

There is no need for staging anything, nobody would need a cruise ship full of drugs to think that drugs are coming out of Venezuela...

Staging an event with a cruise ship as an excuse when they could just do the thing anyway seems like an overly complicated conspiracy theory.

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#46

Post by malcolmwhite »

duxup wrote: post #44
malcolmwhite wrote: post #40

Trump recently announced we are doubling the size of southern command and dramatically increasing our activity off the coast of Venezuela, where this occurred. Could the cruise ship have been doing something sneaky?

Would they need a cruise ship to do a thing?

Why did we ship military supplies aboard the Lusitania?

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#49

Post by camkego »

a3n wrote: post #7
fbonetti wrote: post #2

Well that's embarrassing. Could you imagine being the crew of the cruise ship and having to rescue the clowns that just tried to ram you?

And then, full chutzpah, the rescued crew commandeer the cruise ship, having "boarded" it.

The linked article doesn't seem to say anything like this, did I miss something?

Re: Venezuelan ship sinks itself after ramming cruise liner with a reinforced hull

#50

Post by clairity »

js2 wrote: post #33
ansible wrote: post #23

This is insane. I can't imagine what was going through the Venezuelan captain's head trying to do this. It's one thing if the shooting is already started to defend yourself. But even if this stunt had worked, you're looking at many months of downtime while your ship is being repaired in drydock. Millions of dollars, and bigtime loss of capability for a small navy. Unless you are an icebreaker, you just don't intentio…

I mean, less crazy than trying to ram a ship with a locomotive I suppose: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/0... https://in.reuters.com/video/watch/idOVC7T0OCH Strange days.

> "Moreno now faces a federal charge of one count of train wrecking — a crime that carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison."

haha, being a trainwreck takes on new consequences. i wish they'd reported the conspiracy theory for which he wrecked the train though.

Post reply on HN