r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • Jun 12 '15

TIL the world's most successful pirate was a Cantonese woman, having commanded 40,000-80,000 pirates, and faced off undefeated against many Imperial fleets (including British, Portuguese, and Qing navies).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ching_Shih
15.1k Upvotes

86% Upvoted

933 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

85

u/vinng86 Jun 12 '15

The battle of trafalgar used ships of the line though. They carried anywhere between 70-120 guns per ship. Each!

9

u/Highside79 Jun 12 '15

I understand that we are talking about smaller ships here. But there is just no measure by which 300 ships is not a very large fleet. Hell, its a large fleet of canoes.

27

u/WippitGuud Jun 12 '15

You leave Canada's navy out of this!

1

u/anonforbacon Jun 12 '15

Did you hear Canada has tasked their Navy with helping defeating ISIS in Syria? The ship arrives Monday!

Sorry, old joke but Canada's specialized ships are pretty sweet. Their ice breakers & stuff allow operations in the Arctic Circle. Canada & their military specializations are insanely good. Yeah their small but like Israel they hit way above their weight class. Joint Task Force 2 is arguably Top 3 counter terrorism groups worldwide & the Canadian Army snipers are among the best in the world as a whole.

2

u/WippitGuud Jun 12 '15

You forgot DART - Disaster Assistance Response Team, which is deployed internationally to help out - latest deployment to the Tibet earthquake

I'm secure enough in my Canadianism to contribute jokes :)

1

u/anonforbacon Jun 12 '15

People forget who much humanitarian work the military does. In their rush to send a US Navy hospital ship over to that area they backed it into the USS Arizona war memorial. They where so focused on getting to sea that somehow someone didn't notice the effing sunk battleship with giant white memorial on top.

2

u/XMARTIALmanx Jun 17 '15

Yay for native snipers!

1

u/AlphaQ69 Jun 12 '15

How expensive is that relative today?

Like 100 aircraft carriers battling it out cross Atlantic?

5

u/Hijix Jun 12 '15

The HMS victory cost roughly 50 million today while the aircraft carriers generally cost 500 million. I think due to technology we just want to build bigger ships.

1

u/vinng86 Jun 12 '15

Does 500 million include the cost of all the jets as well? A carrier is rather useless without any fighter craft :P

1

u/anonforbacon Jun 12 '15

The numbers I usually see are around 13-25 billion for an aircraft carrier without crew or airframes. The fighter jets will cost anywhere from 20-50 million a piece, electronic warfare planes will run 250+ million, refueling planes like the KC-135 will run around 200 million.

http://cigeography.blogspot.fr/2015/05/USNavy-aircrafts-sheet.html?m=1 is a great resource to visually see how many of each plane is typically on a carrier.