Real Life/Cool Boat

When men and women sailed the seas, using literal sails, there was still cool. These are examples of Epic Sails...

 * Viking Longships, capable of both crossing the ocean and sailing up rivers, carrying bloodthirsty pillagers, was a terrifying sight for European villages and cities for 200 years. Norsemen could also build one on a spot. With an axe.
 * The Korean Turtle Ship. Its a warship with spikes on the top of it. How awesome is that?
 * Admiral Yi's variant was not only fully closed, but the first known ship with iron armor and built for long-range cannon fire. And a smoke screen dispenser. And one cannon on the ram, to fire inside a breached hull after ramming. "Turtle ships" were faster and more maneuverable than one would expect, due to the combination of sails and oars as well as overall good design (based on a ramming ship and not too overweighted); the Japanese ships opposing them were faster, but haven't long-range weapons and like most of their contemporaries relied mostly on boarding, so the "turtles" had enough of opportunities to ram.
 * The USS Constitution, better known as Old Ironsides, is the oldest ship still seaworthy, having been built in 1797. During the War of 1812, it sunk several British ships, raising the morale of the Navy. The ship's hull was so strong that cannonballs bounced off it like it was Made of Iron, hence its nickname. Note that it's actually made of wood.
 * HMS Victory, flagship of Horatio Nelson, and the oldest vessel still commissioned in any Navy (but confined to dry-dock).
 * The legendary Nova Scotian schooner, the Bluenose. Launched in 1921, for 17 straight years she was undefeated in any racing and fishing competitions she entered. She also starred in the 1933 Chicago World's Fair and George V's Silver Jubilee. The Bluenose has been on Canadian dimes since 1937.
 * The Cutty Sark, a tea clipper so fast it remained profitable to run well into the age of steam-powered boats.
 * The Seeadler ought to qualify. I mean seriously, a sailing warship in 1916?
 * There are still cool sailboats in the modern world; witness the Maltese Falcon. Also, it has a vintage Bentley as a coffee table decoration.
 * Don't forget the America, a schooner so fast that after starting a 53 mile race with a fouled anchor, she won the race by 18 minutes. For the non sailing types, that's so far ahead of the pack that when the Queen of England asked who was in second place, the response was "There is no second, Your Majesty"

When steam came along, ships became cooler...
If your still not convinced how badass this ship is, it's name was immortalized by Star Trek.
 * The Monitor and the Merrimack, the two famous "ironclad" boats from The American Civil War; when these two ships clashed, the fight only ended because they ran out of ammo.
 * The nuclear Enterprise was the eight naval ship to bear the name. The seventh one that came before it (often referred to as "The Grey Ghost" and "The Big E") wasn't nuclear but was still the most decorated ship of WW 2 and one of the few carriers built before the war to fight to nearly the end- it was damaged by a kamikaze strike and would have returned had the war not ended while it was in dry dock.
 * USS Enterprise CV(N)-6 had about the most Badass Crew in WWII. With its aircraft fighting in the battle of pearl harbor, and playing a major role in the battle of midway. The Enterprise herself was just one of the many ships of her class. Her defining trait that makes her so badass is that by 1943 all of the other aircraft carriers had been sunk by the Japanese. Aircraft carriers were the heart of the pacific theater. Having only the Enterprise would basically mean Enterprise vs. The Japanese empire. Enterprise won.
 * Turbinia, the first successful steam turbine powered ship. When built she was the fastest ship afloat, capable of 34.5 knots. Her builder demonstrated this at the Spithead Naval review in 1897 when he decided to arrive unannounced and buzzed the assembled warships before outrunning every picket ship sent to stop her. This demonstration was so successful, that the Royal Navy decided that all future ships would be powered by turbines, leading to...
 * HMS Dreadnought. Admiral Jackie Fisher was made head of the Royal Navy because he had a plan to economize on naval expenditure. That plan involved using submarines to defend against invasions and building battleships that were bigger and faster than anything else in service. Dreadnought was the prototype of these and was probably the most famous ship in the world until the Titanic sank- when it came out other nations suspended their battleship programmes for a while to adjust to it. Hell, in naval history parlance the prewar years are often called the Dreadnought Era.
 * And previous genereations of battleships were collectively renamed as "predreadnoughts". The Dreadnought also carries the distinction of being the only battleship in WWI to sink a submarine - by ramming, no less.
 * One of the cooler dreadnoughts was the Queen Elizabeth-class battleship HMS Warspite, which, despite being a Floating Disaster Area, managed to distinguish itself fighting in both world wars. A good example of the Warspite's career would be her service at the Battle of Jutland, where she was attached to Admiral Beatty's battlecruiser squadron, sustained fifteen direct hits and nearly sinking, before having her steering jam while trying to avoid a collision with the Valiant. With her steering jammed, she end up floating in circles, drawing the fire of the German battlecruisers away from the badly damaged Warrior, whose crew were thus able to abandon ship. When the Warspite's crew managed to regain control of her steering, it incidentally put her on a direct course for the German fleet, with only one turret still capable of operating and no rangefinders or fire control. Despite this, she was still able to fire twelve shots under local control before she was finally ordered to withdraw for repairs.
 * Before aircraft carriers evolved into their current, more standardised, forms, one notable design was the converted Courageous-class cruisers, which had two separate decks: the hangar opened directly onto a shorter flying-off deck at the front of the ship, with a longer landing deck built on the floor above. At the same time, the Japanese carrier Akagi took this a step further, with three flight decks stacked above one another. The designs proved to be inefficient, but both win major cool points.
 * The Deutschland-class heavy cruisers of the Reichsmarine (later the Kriegsmarine). Due to restrictions imposed by the post-WWI Treaty of Versailles, the Germans basically did everything they could to pack a battleship's power onto a boat the size of a cruiser. While this resulted in a ship with several design compromises (such as relatively thin armor), its power and capabilities were such Nightmare Fuel to the British that they started referring to the ships as "pocket battleships." The other ships of the class were called the Admiral Scheer and the infamous Admiral Graf Spee (which, to cut a long story short, was scuttled by its captain to avoid what he thought would be a losing battle). The Deutschland was later renamed as the LÃ¼tzow.
 * Though never passing beyond the experimental stage, the Habbakuk would have qualified in both senses, being a ship constructed out of ice.
 * The Yamato. Largest battleship made (surpassed in military vessel size only by the Nimitz supercarriers), which automatically makes it a Cool Boat, even if it was sunk before causing much damage. Also, the anime Uchuu Senkan Yamato turned it into a Cool Starship, which has to earn it extra points.
 * The German battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz deserve a mention, too. Although not quite as big as the Yamato, they were still larger and more heavily armed than nearly any Allied ship and terrorised the north Atlantic. After Bismarck was destroyed in battle against several British warships, Tirpitz retreated to a naval base in Norway, but it still scared the Allies British enough for them to stage an epic commando raid to deny it a dry dock in France and later a massive air raid in order to sink it (they did, after hitting it with a dozen bombs. Two of the craters left by the bombs that missed are used as artificial lakes today).
 * Both qualify for "Awesome but impractical". It took the firepower of an entire fleet to take out the immobilized Bismarck, and bombs specifically designed for this purpose to sink the Tirpitz.
 * On the other hand, an entire fleet of submarines could have been built with the resources for just one of those ships...
 * They were a flawed design though, their 3 shafts gave less manoeuvrability than the 4 employed by all the other navies of the time, and the central shaft weakened the rear keel where it ran through it (in actual fact it was weak enough that the Bismark's aft separated on the way down).
 * The Bismarck stands out in memory for performing the feat of blowing up Britain's favorite battlecruiser, the Hood, almost before the battle had really started (luck played its part there, to be sure, but still) and for her own arguably heroic last stand against an overwhelming force only days afterwards -- both on her very first actual mission. I'd like to draw a direct parallel to the Titanic, which is likewise remembered first and foremost for that tragic encounter with the iceberg on her maiden voyage...I think the fate of both ships captured the public imagination in a similar fashion. How well either might have done in practice if their respective careers had lasted longer doesn't really affect the myths built around them anymore.
 * The Iowa class battleships, rather than going for the Awesome but Impractical that the Yamato turned out to be, were smaller, faster, and while not as extravagantly armed and armored as the better-known Japanese battleships, had plenty of weapons and armor for the war. It should be noted that Iowa class battleships were the only true battleships to be kept in serious service past World War Two, continually updated with new weapons. Still impractical nowadays, and they are now effectively retired, but no other ship in this section of the list, including the famed-but-terminally impractical Yamato, is still in service.
 * It was definitely as extravagantly armored as the Yamato, just in a different way. The sheer amount of amazingness that resulted from it being designed without cost as an object is simply stunning. All other countries saved homogenous armor for key locations such as engines and the bridge. The Iowas were simply built of the world's finest homogenous armor. Then there's the superlative armor design. There's a reason that the penetration calculations for hits on the Iowas and Yamatos are surprisingly close. Add in their 16" rifles having the best AP shell in the world (about as good as the 18.1" shells on the Yamato), the only fire control system capable of letting the ship maneuver and fire at the same time (employing the Mark 1A Fire Control Computer), and an AA suite to put anything else to shame, and they're quite arguably a far superior warship to the 50% heavier Yamatos. They'd have been about equal surface combatants and were hugely better at AA and much better strategically (Think about the fuel consumption on a 70,000 ton battleship).
 * ...I'll be in my bunk.
 * The North Carolina class battleships, particularly the North Carolina herself. She was originally stationed in the Atlantic to so that she would be available to fight the Tirpitz. When the Tirpitz was a no-show, she was stationed to the Pacific, becoming the first new ship to arrive in the theatre since Pearl Harbor. From there she spent her first few months escorting the Enterprise. During the Battle for Guadalcanal, the North Carolina laid down such an incredible amount of anti-air that the captain of the Enterprise radioed in to ask if she was on fire.
 * The USCGC Taney, a Treasury-class cutter and the only surviving vessel that fought at Pearl Harbor. Currently parked in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
 * The carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5) surely has to qualify, I mean, come on, 2 torpedoes plus the concussion from a destroyer's magazines, and it still took her over a day to sink, plus the 2 torpedoes the day before, and 3 bombs the day before that. That ship was one tough mother.
 * GTS Finnjet, the fastest conventional ferry ever built. Able to hit 33.5 knots on gas turbines and diesels, had a strengthened bow for handling sea ice. Legends abound of outrunning newer fast craft and rescuing an icebreaker during a particularly hard winter.
 * Two absurdly dangerous ships that don't receive much attention. The two first true minelayers, Amur and its sister-ship Yenisey (named after the rivers on Far East) carried 300 sea mines each, and at that time the Russian Empire probably has the best ones. The co-designer and captain of Yenisey was a proponent of the offensive minelaying (as in, "after a minelayer's stern vanishes with the morning mist, you still have a port, but can neither exit nor enter it") and inventor of the system spawning minefields at 10 knots. When these ships were designed, the Russo-Japanese war was unconceivable. It was a weapon made to "end the Great Game in checkmate" (together with the rest of Russian and allied Japanese fleet, of course) and most likely able to do it, not to hide in a port each morning. In the war for which they weren't made minelayers haven't much accomplishments, but 14 May 1904 Hatsuse and Yashima blew up and sunk in a minefield near Port Arthur, left by Amur on their patrol route -- and that was two Japanese battleships more than the whole Russian fleet managed to destroy at Tsushima. This minefield was mere 1/6 of the Amur's full load and not quite the sort of tactics this ship was supposed to use.
 * The Italian Navy always got Awesome but Impractical capital ships (the cruisers were fast than anything in their tonnage but had little armor, and the battleships had the speed, heavy armor and more firepower this side the American and Japanese World War II battleships but had very little range), but their torpedo boats... Well, during World War I the two best battleships of the Austrian Navy left the port to engage battle with one of them embarking a troupe to film their victory, and two torpedo boats popped out of nowhere and sank the other battleship so the troupe could record that.

With guided missiles and nuclear power, we now have...

 * The Nimitz class nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and the earlier USS  Enterprise, the world's first such carrier.
 * The 50 Let Pobedy and the other ships of the nuclear-powered Russian Arktika class icebreaker are the red kings of the Arctic Ocean.
 * Hey hey hey. If you're looking for red kings, I got some red-hulled badasses for you. USCGC Polar Sea and Polar Star are a bit older than the 50 Let, falling apart with age, but they can break just as much ice. Or could, y'know, if they weren't falling apart.
 * The research vessel Chikyu Hakken - a Japanese geological research vessel that can drill 6000-metre-deep holes in the ocean floor.
 * The new British Type 45 Daring-class destroyers, with the radar cross-section of a fishing trawler. Even if it doesn't have all the weapons it can carry fitted. Began appearing in the recruitment ads even before the first one was commissioned.
 * The Russian nuclear-powered "Kirov" class heavy cruisers. 20 anti-shipping missiles, four different kinds of surface-to-air missiles (up to 476 rounds can be carried, 340 ready to fire at any one time), 10 torpedo tubes, CIWS systems and a rapid-firing 130mm twin cannon. Bigger than some light aircraft carriers. A living example of More Dakka. She also has a SIGINT profile compared a Disney-style Christmas Tree with all candles blazing and all mechanical gnomes singing Jingle Bells at maximum volume. In Russian, of course.
 * The Iowa class battleships. That is all.
 * To clarify, and distinguish this example from the previous mention of the Iowa Class, in 1984 Ronald Reagan was signifigantly increasing the size of the US Navy. One target of this increase were the four Iowa Class Battleships, which had all been mothballed since the New Jersey provided fire support during the Vietnam War. The ships were put through an extensive refit, completly gutting the old systems and modernizing the ships. After the refit, the Battleships were arguably the best warships the world has ever, and ever will, see, with the old armament of 16" and 5" guns being supplemented by Tomahawk and Harpoon missiles, Phalanx cannons, and a helipad complete with a Sea Sprite ASW helicopter.
 * Don't know why they thought the "old" armament needed help. The nine 16-inch guns could each fire a 2,000-pound projectile over 20 miles, leaving an impact crater the size of a football field. Looks as cool as it sounds.
 * Because the old armament is completely helpless against even small missile boats which would laugh at only 20 miles of range. Small missile boats can pack missiles with ranges over three times that much, at least. It needed those upgrades to not be a complete sitting duck against modern weaponry. Not to mention that the 20 anti ship missiles of the Kirov class missile cruisers, which the Iowas were supposed to counter, had a range about 12 times as great as the Harpoon anti ship missiles used by the Iowas, were supersonic and were designed to be fired in salvos of 4 or 8 with all missiles in a salvo cooperating to destroy the target.
 * R/P FLIP, a boat capable of capsizing itself and turning itself into a 5-storey tower poking out of the sea, used for ocean research.
 * The Ticonderoga-class cruisers, with their Aegis missile defence system, capable of controlling the missiles of other ships and only capable of being defeated by a Macross Missile Massacre.
 * The South Korean Sejong the Great destroyers, like Arleigh Burkes, but with 128 VLS cells, 16 dedicated anti-shipping missiles and two choppers. It is, as of 2011, the largest surface warfare ship class to carry the Aegis combat system.
 * Coming back to the US Navy, we have the Freedom and Independence class littoral combat ships. Designed to go right up to the shore and give some poor unfortunate a bloody nose (of death), they're also able to swap their gear for whatever mission they happen to be on as well as carrying helicopters and Awesome Personnel Carriers and the troops inside them.

Submarines have always been cool...

 * The new German Type-212 U-Boat, arguably the stealthiest submarine in the world. While much smaller than British or American nuclear submarines, this vessel is non-nuclear - instead, it uses hydrogen fuel-cell arrays for propulsion, which are even quieter than nuclear fission reactors and can be turned off if tactics call for it.
 * The Soviet/Russian "Typhoon" class of nuclear missile submarines is the largest ever built. Each can carry 20 ballistic missiles, each with 10 warheads and also nuclear-tipped anti-shipping missiles. Very roomy for a sub, it has a sauna and a small swimming pool on board, as well as having the ability to stay submerged for up to a year.
 * It's been proposed that the unused Typhoon hulls be converted to transport submarines with 15000 tonnes of cargo capacity.
 * ...and its counterpart, the US Navy's Ohio-class SSBN. So damned quiet, enemy crews learned to listen for suspicious areas of completely silent water rather than trying to pick up anything aboard the boat itself.
 * Four have been converted to carry over 150 Tomahawk conventional cruise missiles.
 * Really, any modern American sub is an exercise in BadAssery. See also: the Los Angeles, Seawolf and Virginia classes of fast-attack SSN.
 * This troper worked on the second and third Seawolf class submarines (Connecticut and Jimmy Carter). I didn't have high security clearance or access to detailed specs, not that I'd be able to share them if I did, but I have seen enough to say for certain that any of the estimates of that submarine's capabilities that I've seen are...somewhat of an understatement.
 * Though it is worth noting that the Polar Bear that tried to make a snack out of the Connecticut may just be the most badass of all.
 * Not to be outdone, the Royal Navy has the Astute-class nuclear attack sub. It has the same "enemies can detect it by looking for suspiciously quiet water" as the Ohio class, to such an extent that the designers were forced to make the vessel noisier to compensate.
 * The Australian Collins class. Can sneak up on US carriers in exercises.
 * The Swedish HMS Gotland is a conventional sub with an Stirling engine that provides very good underwater endurance. She was used as an "enemy sub" in training exercises with the US Pacific Fleet of the coast of California some years ago. She put imaginary torpedoes in various aircraft carriers at several exercises, beacuse of her extreme stealthiness, while the US Navy ASW crews never got a chance to pay back in kind.
 * Yes the US Navy was so concerned with the results that they rented the submarine for a year to try to figure out how it does what it does and how the hell to prevent it, after that year they were not much closer to a solution than when they started.
 * They know most of the 'hows' for what it does. The problem is, the how boils down to 'it incorporates every stealth-trick there was when they were laid down, diesel-electric engines are naturally less noisy than nuclear fission, and the Stirling engine extends their underwater endurance to lengths only (then) rivaled by nuclear submarines'. It's hard to figure out how to solve a problem that is fundamentally the exact same problem as before (How To Find A Quiet Moving Underwater Object), only harder.
 * And let's not forget the Great-Granmammy of all these sweet sexy sea lassies: The CSS Hunley. Now, saddly she was a bit of a, ah... Sinking Disaster Area with sinking three times taking two and a half crews (and her financier/builder) with her, but she was the very first submarine to ever sink an enemy ship in combat. And don't let those images on The Other Wiki fool you. When the wreck was finally lifted from the seafloor (and removed of the low visiblility), people were saying that, with the surprising knife-like bow and stern and flush rivets, the sub looks a lot more like a WWI-Era U-Boat than the boxy retrofitted boiler that everyone was expecting. Keep in mind that this thing was built during the hieght of the American Civil War by the industrially behind Confederacy, during a time when water-tight seals and pressure hulls intended to go under the surface for extended periods of time were beyond the cutting edge at best.
 * And of course the first real submarine: the German Type XXI U-Boot, designed to be submerged most of the time instead of spending most of the time above the surface like the other submarines of the time, it is the inspiration for most of the later submarines, though like many of Germany's late war projects this too was unfinshed and only two submarines made patrols where they both failed to actually sink something.

When you are saving the whales...

 * It definitely helps to have a boat that you'd expect Batman to have.
 * Until it got sunk.
 * Not to mention now forever stuck in our memories with a bad paintjob,and being called the Bat-mobile.
 * Was replace with the "Gojjira"(japanese for Godzilla). Yes, they were entertained by the Japanese radio messages of "We are being attacked by Godzilla!"
 * Corporate suits weren't amused, however.

But before that/When you want get around the world in a hurry..

 * She was known as the Earthrace,Had a MUCH cooler paintjob and circumnavigated the world in 61 days back in 2008.This WAS before her owner had a Leeroy Jenkins moment,and joined a certain Animal Wrongs Group.
 * Try the (unfortunately Canceled) HMCS Bras d'Or (FHE 400). This military hydrofoil was clocked at over 63 knots (117 km/h!! or 72 mph!!) making it possibly the fastest warship ever built!

Go back on board the Cool Boat. Make sure you have your seasickness pills...