This short documentary tackles one of history's most instructive engineering disasters — almost certainly the story of the Swedish warship Vasa, which capsized and sank in Stockholm harbor on its maiden voyage in 1628, less than a mile from shore.

The video explores what happens when royal ambition overrides naval architecture. King Gustavus Adolphus wanted the most heavily armed warship in Europe, demanding a second gun deck be added mid-construction. The shipwrights — who knew the design would be top-heavy and unstable — were powerless to refuse a king. The result was a ship with insufficient ballast, a dangerously high center of gravity, and gun ports that flooded the moment she heeled in a light breeze.

Why it's worth watching: It's a compact case study in the consequences of ignoring stability calculations, the social dynamics of expertise being overruled by power, and how the preserved wreck (raised in 1961) became one of the most important sources we have for 17th-century shipbuilding. The channel is small but the framing — "ignored physics" — promises a real explanation of metacentric height and ship stability rather than just retelling the sinking.