The Alleged Car / Real Life – Other Vehicles

Rocket scientists take note: This is not what a rocket is supposed to do.

The Epic Fail is hardly limited to automobiles.

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Motorcycles

• Harley-Davidsons developed a dubious reputation for being Alleged Motorcycles due to their supposed lack of reliability, though this was more due to haphazard modifications by smart-aleck enthusiasts who customize their bikes without accounting for whether the two-wheeled Frankenstein's monster they created would take them places in one piece. To the detractors' credit, however, the MoCo did suffer a decline in quality during their Audience-Alienating Era when they were part of American Machine and Foundry, a MegaCorp known for producing nuclear facilities, yachts, and tennis rackets (you're probably most familiar with AMF from their ownership of bowling alleys). Such was the AMF era's notoriety that their factory lines had sections dedicated to rectifying any defects that showed up in their bikes during production, leading to the "Harley-Davidson" name to be mocked as "Hardly Ableson", "Hardly Drivable", and "Hogly Ferguson". This also led to veteran Hell's Angel Sonny Barger to make some rather blunt remarks towards Harley, once lamenting that they were too late to jump ship to Honda or BMW; they stuck to Harleys largely out of patriotism and due to the club's image.^note (As motorcycle clubs were mostly founded by WWII veterans, riding bikes made by their {former} adversaries would've been rather awkward, never mind the fact that there are Japanese chapters of the Hell's Angels.)
• The Chang Jiang CJ750 is a Chinese copy of a Russian copy of a pre-WWII BMW. It was built using tooling the Russians considered worn and obsolete.

Military Ground Vehicles

• The Elefant tank destroyer, initially dubbed the "Ferdinand", was the result of automotive engineer Ferdinand Porsche's bid to design and produce the Tiger I tank. In applying his ambitious engineering style, Porsche proposed a tank with a radical drive design in which two gasoline engines powered two electric generators that then powered electric motors on drive sprockets. While the arrangement gave the tank good maneuverability, it also made the prototype too complex and heavy, which in turn caused frequent breakdowns and fires. Porsche ultimately lost the contract, but he was so confident that he'd win that 100 tank hulls had already been built. Rather than scrap them, the Wehrmacht re-purposed them into tank destroyers, which meant adding armor and armaments, making the weight problems even worse. Once deployed, the Elefants fell victim to the same failures which blighted the Tiger prototype, forcing their crews to frequently abandon and destroy them on the battlefield when they inevitably broke down. So bad were the Elefant's mobility flaws that during the Battle of Kursk, it was reported that the simple act of trying to drive up a sloping hill caused many to catch fire from overheating engines. Worse still, when it was discovered that the slow-moving vehicles were highly vulnerable to infantry "swarm" attacks, it became necessary to add even more weight to fit a ball-mounted machine gun, a coating of anti-magnetic mine paste, and extra armor.^note (Said anti-magnetic mine paste, called Zimmerit, was basically useless anyway. The only country that actually used magnetic anti-tank grenades was Germany itself. The Allies' anti-tank grenades were almost all meant to be thrown, fired from a rifle or recoilless gun, or laid down as land mines. The main thing Zimmerit accomplished was adding a few more days to the production time of any vehicle it was applied to, as it took time to apply it, pattern it, and then dry it with blowtorches.)
• Fascist Italy's Fiat-Ansaldo Carro Veloce CV3/35 was an Alleged Tank (or "Tankette"). Built to be cheap, fast, and simple, it was also uncomfortable and unsafe. It lacked a turret, was armed only with hull-mounted machine guns, had armor that could be penetrated by a rifle bullet in places, said armor was initially riveted together (a design that was two decades out of date), and was small enough that it could get stuck in shell holes and trenches that any serious tank would roll right over. Despite the myriad of flaws, the tankette saw service anyway, with predictable results. But it was cheap, so it was widely exported.
• The A38 Valiant was an Alleged Tank. Intended to be a lightweight yet heavily armored infantry support tank, it was such a disaster that ultimately only one prototype was ever built. In its one test in May 1945 (a short ~20km drive on level ground), the test driver reported that he had exhausted himself simply operating the controls and that several items inside his station, including his own seat and the foot pedals, were liable to cause physical injury. The examining officer halted all further testing on the spot and recommended that the Valiant program be ended immediately, which it was. For many years, the Valiant prototype was displayed to engineering students as an example of how not to design a tank. It would be taken in front of them and then the kids would be asked to list any mistakes they found. David Fletcher wrote on this practice: "One hopes they started early in the morning." It now resides in a museum.
• The Gama Goat was an ill-fated attempt to replace the U.S. Army's venerable Jeep. How well did it accomplish that goal? To quote The Other Wiki:
  While the Gama Goat had exceptional off-road ability, its quirky steering made it hard to handle on pavement, and its tendency to flounder in amphibious operations required drivers to have special training in order to operate it. This meant it could not be the "general purpose" vehicle the Army had hoped for, and production was halted after the original contract expired. This is somewhat ironic, as some claim the problems were largely due to cost-cutting modifications made at the request of the US Army.
• You thought the Gama Goat was problematic? Ford's M151 MUTT was worse. It appears that nobody test-drove the vehicle in field conditions and its handling was so bad that just taking a sharp turn at low speed risked a rollover, where the lack of rollbars would ensure the death of the driver. It got worse when the guys in charge of improving the M151 rejected every single report that recommended rollbars and better suspension until the Department of Defense finally ordered the installation of said upgrades. Unsurprisingly, the M151 would be the last evolution of the classic Jeep to see military service, and would be replaced by the HMMWV series in the 1980s. In a final insult, they were deemed unfit for sale to the public on the surplus market for fear of more fatal rollovers, with the Army going so far as to cut each survivor into two or more pieces with a torch upon retirement.
• The Bob Semple tank was New Zealand's attempt to build their own tanks during WWII so they'd have something to meet a feared Japanese invasion. However, lacking a large industrial base, the only thing on-hand that could be used as a tank chassis were repurposed agricultural bulldozers covered by a thin layer of steel plating. The resulting vehicle was unsurprisingly slow, lightly armored, and could only fit a few machine guns for armament, one of which could only be fired by a crewman willing to lie on top of the hot, running engine. These flaws made them all but useless against anything other than light infantry should they have to repel a landing force, which fortunately never came to pass.
• In the 1970s, the US army decided that it needed a new anti-aircraft vehicle to protect tanks and infantry from attacks by helicopters and low-altitude fixed wing aircraft. This led to the development of the M247 Sergeant York. Built on an M48 Patton hull with a new turret containing radar-controlled 40mm autocannons, most of the equipment that was used in its construction was from pre-existing components that were already in use in other vehicles. The idea was that this would make the project cheaper, faster to develop, and easier to repair. In practice, however, this was a complete failure owing to a lack of adequate testing. The radar system and targeting computer was taken from the F-16 Fighting Falcon and was completely unable to handle being on the ground, where it was frequently confused by ground clutter it couldn't filter out. In demonstrations, the Sergeant York was unable to lock onto the targets it was supposed to shoot at, even when they flew in a straight line or were hovering stationary. Only after attaching extra panels to the target drone that gave it a radar profile that was four times larger than a normal helicopter was it able to actually track anything. On top of this, the radar was found to be easily defeated by enemy jamming systems and the hydraulics that operated the turret were prone to leaking and failing in cold weather. The problems didn't end there - in one infamous incident, merely being washed prior to a demonstration led to an electrical fault that caused the turret to suddenly swing and point its barrels at a group of gathered spectators! Finally, all the extra equipment and armaments weighted the original chassis down to the point it couldn't keep up with contemporary ground vehicles, negating its intended role as a mobile defense system. By 1985, well behind schedule and incredibly over budget, the decision was made to cancel the project by the Secretary of Defense himself.
• Tsarist Russia produced a couple of these during World War One:
  • The Vezdekhod, an early type of all-terrain vehicle, was tested in 1915. It proved to be impossible to steer with the designed wheels, and the military dropped the idea.
  • The Tsar Tank looked like some sort of bizarre cross between a tank and a penny-farthing bicycle. It had two massive spoked front wheels and a single small rear wheel. In a field test, the rear wheel got bogged down in soft terrain and the front wheels couldn't pull it out. As with the Vezdekhod, the Russian military scrapped the idea as impractical.

Aircraft

• The umbrella term for aircraft of this nature is "Hangar Queens", as in aircraft that are constantly in the maintenance hangar due to constantly being in a state of disrepair. Notably, this may be assigned to planes of a type that are otherwise known for their robustness, but the individual aircraft have entered this state due to constant battle damage, weather stress, or lack of quality replacement parts. This trend does not mean that the aircraft was badly designed, but for bad designs, see the items below.
• Blackburn was a British builder of naval aircraft who developed a reputation for turning out clumsy and cumbersome planes.
  • The Blackburn TB was designed as a dedicated zeppelin killer, but troubles finding a suitable engine ultimately led to a plane that was very slow and most gallingly, could not climb to the average cruising height of the zeppelins it was supposed to destroy. Even if they had been able to reach that altitude, it still wouldn't have been enough. The only armament was a canister of large incendiary darts that had to be hand-dropped from above in the hopes of starting and then igniting a hydrogen gas leak. Only nine TBs were produced, all of them scrapped before seeing combat.
  • The Blackburn Botha, built in 1938, was a two-engine four-seat torpedo bomber built for reconnaissance missions, except that the view from the crew compartment was so abysmal as to defeat the purpose of reconnaissance. The Botha was also underpowered and unstable, largely from having to carry the additional weight of an extra crew member on top of its intended torpedo armament. Not surprisingly, the plane was prone to crashes, resulting in numerous fatalities both before and after its withdrawal from military service in 1941.
  • The Blackburn Roc was built as an unconventional two-man "turret" fighter, having all of its armament mounted in said turret. The thinking was that a small plane with a dedicated gunner handling a concentrated single stream of fire would be more effective at downing enemy planes, especially bombers. Unfortunately, the turret could not be trained at any enemy directly in front of the plane, and the decision to use .303 caliber machineguns (as was always the case with every British fighter at the time) limited its potential for dealing damage. Worse, the plane was slow and unwieldy, and vastly inferior to then-current fighter craft fielded by the German air force. Only two squadrons ever operated Rocs; one did its best to get rid of them as quickly as possible, the other tried to carry out some missions with them but eventually gave up, stopped maintaining them, and relegated them to stationary anti-air emplacements - essentially glorified dollies for their turrets. To add insult to injury, the Roc was outperformed in virtually every department by its Alternate Company Equivalent, the Boulton Paul Defiant, which went on to become a successful and dependable night fighter.
    • The only time a Roc ever killed any enemy aircraft was when one shot up a Junkers Ju 88 from below, while said bomber was also being attacked by a couple of Skuas from above. And the only time a Roc ever successfully engaged any enemy aircraft one-on-one was against an outdated Heinkel He 59 (a "rescue" floatplane that had gone armed). The duel resulted in both planes limping back to their respective bases heavily damaged and leaking fuel (and in the German plane's case, half the crew dead). Not surprisingly, very few crews thought well of the Roc, except when their opponents were flying planes that were even worse at fighting.
• Just because a plane looks good on paper doesn't mean that it will perform well. The Saunders-Roe Lerwick was a flying boat that wasn't great at flying or floating on water. It had a ludicrously high accident rate, with records of parts falling off midflight and stalling during level cruising. All 21 examples were put into service because of a shortage of better aircraft for long maritime patrols. The Lerwicks only engaged in combat against U-boats twice and failed to sink any of the submarines in question. British and Canadian pilots hated the Lerwicks so much that they were glad when the planes were all scrapped.
• It's good to research and develop successors to one's own airplane, but one has to wonder how anyone in the US Navy or in the Curtiss-Wright Corporation thought the Seamew was a good idea. The very first problem was the engine selected by the Navy, the very problematic Ranger V-770-8. The inverted V engine failed to deliver its nominal 600 horsepower most of the time, making pilots miserable as they had to operate with less than even half a fuel tank in order to perform a normal water takeoff (catapulting the aircraft gave better results, but remember that one has to taxi the aircraft back to the ship for recovery, and if you can't even move the aircraft along the ocean's surface, you're good as drowned). Secondly, the aircraft's observer canopy formed part of the vertical stabilizer, meaning that opening and closing the canopy midflight led to stability problems, making the crew quite airsick. Last, but not least, the aircraft had very poor stability in cruising, even after modifications were introduced to prevent inadvertent rolling or pitching. Given this, the captains of many an American warship demanded their older Curtiss SOC Seagull biplanes back from training units. When the Seamew was delivered to the British Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm, British sailors called it the Sea Cow. They even wondered how anyone in his right mind would let the Seamew leave the factory, let alone have the underperforming plane delivered to an allied country. No surprise that the British scrapped all their Seamews after 1945.
• The Christmas Bullet, brainchild of "Doctor" William Whitney Christmas, which he managed to get the Army and Congress to pay for. It was supposed to bend its strutless wings to provide control, but this technique only managed to cause the wings to fall off - which doomed the first prototype, killing its pilot and losing the Army a prototype engine. Christmas built another identical plane, which promptly failed in exactly the same way, again killing its pilot. Undaunted by such trivial details, Christmas kept insisting it was a successful design and even claimed it had passed the tests safely. According to one author, Christmas was a con artist and "the kind of man they write songs about"; he lived to 94, and even in his last years kept coming up with implausible airplane designs (which nobody took seriously). Perhaps the government believed that the amount of money required to prosecute the man for fraud was more than the man himself was worth.
• Unlike the Karma Houdini above, the Brewster Buffalo and the Brewster Aeronautical Corporation did get what was coming to them. While the Finnish Air Force got the plane to perform admirably (out of 96 Finnish pilots to become aces during the war, 36 did so with the Buffalo - almost one-third of all Finnish air-to-air kills in the war were with the Buffalo, second only to the Bf 109 which made the majority of the other two-thirds), in the Pacific Americans faced a Curb-Stomp Battle as the Buffalo was slow and underpowered compared to the Japanese A6M "Zero" (a plane that was itself rather slow compared to other planes of the war, but at least made up for it with wicked maneuverability). Much of this was due to the Buffalo not getting enough horsepower to compensate for the added weight of guns and pilot armor, as it actually performed well during initial testing without weaponry. To top it off, Brewster's manufacturing on the Buffalo was notoriously bad, with problems such as overheating engines (even moreso in the tropical Pacific climate, sometimes resulting in oil randomly squirting out of the engine onto the windscreen), improperly-sealed fuel tanks, and the firewall between the engine and the cockpit being too thin, the latter of which resulted in the cockpit often smelling of aviation gasoline, earning the Buffalo earning the ignominious nickname of the "Flying Gas Leak". Eventually, the CEO of Brewster Aeronautical was forced out due to mismanagement (lots of workers went on strike and even sabotaged their own work because they didn't get paid, further decreasing build quality) and the US Navy forcibly took over the corporation. He tried to get back in, only to be sued for his mismanagement. The company ended its days making the F4U Corsair under license - and even then, the planes in question were so bad that quite a few of them literally disintegrated midflight, causing at least one angry bailed-out pilot (and some military policemen) to demand that Brewster give the Navy its money back!
• The Bell YFM-1 Airacuda suffered from a number of serious flaws; most could, perhaps, be understandable with context. It was intended as a "heavy" fighter that could carry more guns and thus sling more lead at bombers, downing them quicker than traditional fighters while also being able to carry a small number of bombs for ground attack missions. While many other militaries of the day also looked into the idea, it was ultimately abandoned with none of the designs entering service. The main problem was that the greater size and weight of heavy fighters made them susceptible to being caught and downed by regular fighters, while the proposed bomb payloads ended up too small to justify using them in place of actual dedicated bombers. But the Airacuda had one, extra, truly baffling flaw on top of this. Despite being powered by two large main engines that could have easily run ancillary systems - as they do in every other plane ever made - it was designed such that everything was dependent on a small internal engine powering a generator. Emphasis on everything - even the fuel pumps for the main engines were dependent on the lone generator. If it died? So would the entire plane around it.
• The Soviet Yakovlev Yak-38 VTOL fighter was a deeply flawed design: unlike the successful American and British Harrier, which directs the engine's thrust through a set of nozzles that rotate to propel the jet upwards or forwards, the Yak-38 required two additional downward-pointing engines to hover, which eventually doomed the project. The lift engines, while in theory allowing for faster and less hazardous transitions from hovering to forward flight than the Harrier (since the forces involved in each part are entirely separate), were finicky to start in hot conditions, lacked redundancy such that if one failed the other would roll the plane into a crash, and they guzzled fuel with abandon. And for all that they'd become dead weight as soon as the plane transitioned to horizontal flight, severely limiting the payload and flight performance. To top it all off, the tendency of the plane to crash from lift jet failure prompted Soviet engineers to install an auto-eject safety measure that'd save the pilot in case of a sudden change in pitch - a safety measure which, in true late-Soviet tradition, failed to work properly. Cue false alarms ejecting pilots from perfectly functional planes, with predictable results.
• The Vought F7U Cutlass, in addition to having a bizarre and truly ugly appearance, was an underpowered and notoriously unstable aircraft. Intended as a radical new design, the Cutlass abandoned traditional tail control surfaces in favor of a swept-wing design inspired by late WWII-era German prototypes, a configuration which ultimately doomed the aircraft. The final result lacked sufficient thrust to perform well during takeoff and landing maneuvers and struggled to stay aloft in certain flight regimes (leading the naval aviation community to nickname the aircraft "Gutless Cutlass"). Of the 320 units produced, nearly a quarter were lost in takeoff and landing accidents, including the first three prototypes, earning the Cutlass the nickname "The Ensign Eliminator" (among other names less suited for polite conversation) from its pilots. In the end, the Cutlass's poor reliability led many naval squadrons to ditch it in favor of the already proven F9F Cougar until something better could be found. Despite these issues, the U.S. Navy's Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, acquired two Cutlasses for the purpose of side demonstrations at air shows, though those were eventually retired once the flaws of the design became evident.
• One of the worst propeller planes ever devised for the military was the Republic XF-84H Thunderscreech. The name alone is a fitting description of it, as it's capable of producing sonic booms at the propeller tips even when idling. Its auditory profile was an infamous Brown Note, causing illness to ground crews working near the thing. But why make such a plane in the first place? It was built shortly after World War II during the first generation of jet age aircraft and one of the requirements the US Navy wanted was an aircraft of similar design and performance that everyone else was getting (the XF-84H was based off the F-84 series of jet fighters) but could take off from a carrier without catapult assistance. The problem was jet-powered planes at the time couldn't take off fast enough from a carrier without a catapult, but propeller-powered planes could. The end result was this.
• The Supermarine Scimitar was the Royal Navy's first carrier-based jet bomber. It was also a hideously unsafe aircraft to fly - though the Royal Navy's small carrier decks were partially to blame, the Scimitar nonetheless lost a mind-boggling 51% of its entire production run in accidents, and this in a short 12-year career. It was replaced by the Blackburn Buccaneer as soon as possible and was relegated to tanker roles before being retired.
• The Bachem Ba 349 was basically nothing more than a wooden glider with a rocket engine, rocket boosters, and more rockets in the nose, launched off a tower and only good for a single shotgun-like salvo of unguided rockets in the general direction of an enemy bomber formation, with aiming mostly accomplished by hopes and prayers. The idea behind it was to create an aircraft that would be cheap to produce and required minimal training to fly, as by this point in WWII it was becoming clearer and clearer that the war was going badly for the Axis Powers and the Nazis were becoming increasingly desperate. The only manned flight of the Ba 349 ended disastrously when test pilot Lothar Sieber died from a combination of assembly flaws and trying to eject at near-sonic velocities. Despite the setback, the Nazis nevertheless commissioned 36 more units for use in wartime, though none were used, and most survivors were scrapped after the war as no conquering party had any interest in such a patently absurd weapon.
• The Heinkel He 177 was Nazi Germany's attempt to create a heavy bomber at the height of WWII that could compete with the Avro Lancaster or Boeing B-17 in terms of range and payload while also possessing superior speed and climb performance. However, in order to get that performance, the plane had to be built with two engines to reduce drag, rather than the four engines on the Lanc and Flying Fortress. Germany consistently struggled with making more powerful and reliable aircraft engines, and so simply took two Daimler DB-601 engines, the same type used to power the well-regarded Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter aircraft, and joined them together in pairs, geared together to drive a single propeller. This greatly impeded engine cooling, so it wasn't uncommon to have them run so hot that they occasionally burst into flames, earning the He 177 such nicknames as "Luftwaffe's Lighter" or "Burning Coffin". To make matters worse, the original specification for the He 177 called for it to double as a dive bomber, which put a massive amount of stress on the wing assembly and caused multiple accidents. Although more than 1,170 aircraft were manufactured, the He 177 ultimately had little impact on the course of the war, and all units were scrapped following the Nazis' defeat.
• If you thought the Blackburn Roc was bad, then Fascist Italy's Breda Ba.88 "Lince" was worse. This attractive-looking attack plane performed well during testing without weapons or armor, although the framework was a bit heavy (owing to the fact that fuselage was mostly steel tubing). Once the guns, bomb-racks, armor plates, and engine-filters were installed, the plane became little more than a sitting duck, as the unreliable engines failed to deliver enough horsepower to achieve takeoff. As a result, any time the Lince sortied, it had to carry less than its full load of ammunition and fuel (and even then, it had to fly in a straight line to its target, drop its bombs, and then attempt to get home without suffering engine failure or stalling). All examples of this once-promising plane were eventually stripped of their weapons and expended as decoys.
• The Messerschmitt Me 163 Komet was a very advanced design using a rocket engine to achieve speeds that had never been seen before at the expense of endurance. By itself, there is nothing idiotic in this - the fighter was meant for rapid short-range defense of important German installations, and getting to the enemy bombers quickly was more important than staying in the air a long time. However, in the frenzied research to get the plane to go as fast as humanly achievable with the technology of the time, nobody stopped to think of what would happen at such ludicrous speeds once the target was reached. When the first sorties against enemy aircraft began, it quickly became apparent that the Komet was too fast - it was able to blow past the entire enemy formation before the escorting fighters could form any sort of organised response, but at that speed there was no way of reliably hitting the bombers - they'd be in and out of the target reticle for enough time to maybe land a shell or two with luck, but four or five shells were needed to reliably bring one down. The rest of the Komet project was spent trying to get the Komet to reliably slow down, but by the time that was achieved (by completely redesigning the engine) no more fuel was available to run them, and soon after that the war ended. In the end the Komet project brought down a total of only 16 enemy planes, at the expense of losing at least as many Komets - mostly due to accidents involving the hyper-reactive fuels.
• On the Soviet side of the conflict was the Lavochkin-Gorbunov-Gudkov LaGG-3. An update of the LaGG-1 prototype, the LaGG-3 was constructed almost entirely out of pine wood mixed with resin in order to get strong and light airframes while reducing the amount of expensive aluminum alloys used in production. While the "delta wood" didn't catch fire, it did shatter beyond repair if hit with autocannon shells. Lackluster aerobatic performance and sluggish controls made pilots miserable. As such, Soviet pilots often joked that "LaGG" actually stood for "Lakirovanny Garantirovanny Grob", or "Guaranteed Varnished Coffin". The LaGG-3 also suffered a rushed production run, resulting in many components not being made to spec. Shortages of designer Semyon Lavochkin's preferred engine resulted in the plane being built with the Klimov VK-105, which couldn't deliver enough horsepower to improve aerobatic performance (as mentioned before, the LaGG-3 was pretty clumsy). To make matters worse, the cooling system couldn't insulate properly when the engine was not running, so mechanics had to boil a kettle of water and pour it into the coolant tank so that the engine could be warmed up before any sortie in winter conditions. Appalled by the end result, Lavochkin severed his ties with co-workers Mikhail Gudkov and Vladimir Gorbunov and redesigned the aircraft himself. The result was the Lavochkin La-5 and La-7, both of which went on to become among the Soviet Air Force's most dependable fighters in the war.
• The Silvansky IS, the first Soviet attempt to match the Bf 109 and the first, and last, product of the Silvansky design bureau. Silvansky was given the job in spite of not being an engineer simply because he was related to a high-ranking commissar who had Stalin's favor, and recruited the engineers from a number of design bureaus that had closed down. The end result was a prototype that, even without the guns, could barely take off, was unstable, had the engine prone to overheating while idle, the landing gear couldn't properly retract, and the controls were sticky. The test pilot declared it unfliable (with plenty of expletives), and the only prototype was brought to the Moscow Aviation Institute as an example of how not to design an aircraft, with Silvansky avoiding jail but being barred from working an engineering job ever again.
• You would think that nobody working for Imperial Japan would be insane enough to create a literal suicide plane apart from the rocket-propelled MXY-7 Ohka. Unfortunately, the Nakajima Aircraft Company created the Ki-115 Tsurugi, which was little more than a bomb-carrier in the shape of an airplane. As the aircraft was to be expended in massive waves against any American invasion of the Japanese home islands, the Ki-115 was made mostly of wood and low-grade steel and would be powered up by surplus obsolete engines like the Nakajima Sakae. The undercarriage was designed to be jettisoned upon combat takeoff as the plane was supposed to be expended (smashed into an American warship). Not surprisingly, the Ki-115 suffered lots of fatalities during test flights and initial training flights owing to the rather small wings giving insufficient lift for maneuvers.
• On the civilian side, there was the Tupolev Tu-144. It was the world's first supersonic airliner to fly, but beyond that it accomplished absolutely nothing notable or remarkable. The Tu-144 was developed at the insistence of the Soviet government for the sole purpose of giving the Soviet Union a supersonic airliner before the West had one. Because its development was so rushed to meet state deadlines, the Tu-144 was inefficient, cramped, extremely noisy, and above all unsafe. The engines in particular were so poorly designed that the afterburners had to be kept on at all times just to maintain cruising speed, severely compromising the aircraft's range and completely wrecking its fuel economy as well as producing unacceptable levels of smoky exhaust and making the cabin so loud that passengers seated right next to each other could only communicate by shouting at the top of their lungs and passengers two or more seats apart couldn't hear each other at all and had to pass handwritten notes. The first production model crashed at the Paris Air Show in 1976, killing 33 people, and when the Tu-144 was finally put into service it could only sustain one flight a week. It came off as a Shoddy Knockoff Product of the Aérospatiale/BAC Concorde, and gained the nickname "Konkordski". It made a grand total of 103 scheduled flights (half of which were cargo delivery) during its service life, all between Moscow and Alma Ata, before being retired in 1978.
• The Baade 152 was East Germany's first (and ultimately only) domestically-produced aircraft, as well as Germany's first domestically-produced jet liner, but beyond that it didn't really accomplish much. Based on an unproduced jet bomber concept by Junkers, the Baade 152 used a high-wing design and centerline landing gear with outrigger wheels on the wing tips, similar to the Boeing B-47 Stratojet. This configuration works fine for a jet bomber like the B-47 but is spectacularly ill-suited to a passenger jet as it limits interior space, leaving virtually no room for passenger compartments. The first prototype crashed on its second flight, killing everyone onboard, forcing the engineers to make significant changes to the design, but this only introduced a litany of new problems, and the project was officially cancelled in 1961.
• Deadly design flaws unfortunately have been a regular occurrence with one of the world's most popular airliners, the Boeing 737:
  • During the 1990s, the original 737 was blighted by repeated incidents involving loss of control over the plane's rudder, which was eventually traced back to the dual servo valve in the 737's Power Control Unit (PCU). Testing by Boeing and the NTSB revealed that under the right circumstances, the valve could jam and deflect the rudder in the opposite direction of the pilots' pedal input. This malfunction resulted in two (almost three) deadly crashes in which a total of 157 people lost their lives. Once the fault was discovered, the FAA ordered servo valves to be replaced on all 737 aircraft.
  • The Boeing 737 MAX, the 737's fourth-generation upgrade, has become the most notoriously troubled modern commercial aircraft design in recent aviation history, with major scandals erupting on two separate occasions just a few years apart.
    • The crashes of Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were both traced a flaw in the plane's Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS), or flight control mode, causing the combined deaths of 346 people. Intended to electronically control pitch without pilot input^note (the 737 MAX's engines are mounted further forward and higher up on the wing to allow greater ground clearance, which results in a tendency for the plane to pitch up during certain maneuvers. The MCAS is supposed to dampen those tendencies and make the plane easier to fly), the MCAS had a tendency to give out false indications from exterior sensors, a flaw which Boeing knowingly covered up. The system was programmed by poorly-paid subcontractors in India without proper testing or supervision, and could take control even if there was no problem with the pilot's actions. Boeing used Loophole Abuse to imply that the MAX was just an upgrade of the existing 737 models, when it was actually so different that it should've required extensive pilot training, which would have familiarized crews with the new systems, but also cost airlines significant time and money. This resulted in the MAX being grounded worldwide between 2019 and 2020, during which time the craft underwent a substantial design overhaul. Boeing was charged with fraud and settled out of court, agreeing to pay $2.5 billion, and confidence in the company plummeted, as did sales.
    • Just as the legacy of the MCAS scandal was starting to fade, a new scandal involving the MAX emerged in 2024. Alaska Airlines Flight 1282, flying a low-capacity configuration of the aircraft with plugged central emergency exits (as is legally permitted for aircraft with a capacity below 200 passengers), suffered an uncontrolled decompression shortly after takeoff when one of those door plugs blew out; thankfully with no deaths or serious injury. Along with another grounding and inspection of the relevant aircraft, this lead again to more scrutiny of Boeing, this time of its manufacturing quality control practices. The subsequent investigation revealed that several bolts securing the door plug were outright missing on the accident aircraft, apparently having been removed during a mid-assembly inspection and somehow never replaced. Loose bolts were subsequently discovered in many other MAX aircraft that had also plugged their emergency exits.
• Before the 737, there was the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. While for the most part a decent aircraft, the DC-10's early operational history was marred by a design flaw in its cargo doors^note (its cargo doors open outwards, which allows for use of more cargo space since the doors aren't taking any of it up to open, but also requires heavy locking mechanisms to avoid explosive decompressions from the force of pressurization. The problem is that there was no way to confirm beyond a shadow of a doubt that the DC-10's cargo doors were properly latched closed) which led to two crashes, one of which was the deadliest in aviation history at the time. After the FAA grounded the entire fleet in 1979, McDonnell Douglas rectified the design flaw, and the plane was put back into service...but by then it was too late: the lingering stigma over the DC-10's safety, as well as the plane's reputation for having poor fuel economy, led to sales plummeting and McDonnell Douglas pulling the plug in 1983. Even then, they were forced to update the existing airframes again in 1989 after another major accident caused by what turned out to be the engineers' hubris: they didn't put in any backups for its hydraulic systems, concluding it was highly improbable for the three hydraulic lines to fail all at once, even though they were routed so closely together below the rear engine that it was perfectly possible for an uncontained failure of that engine to put shrapnel through all three, as it did with United Airlines Flight 232 (it only made a partially-successful crash landing, as in only losing one-third of its passengers and not all of them, by constantly adjusting thrust to the other two engines to maintain a semblance of control).
  • The McDonnell Douglas MD-11, a lengthened and modernized version of the DC-10, might have been an even bigger flop. Despite its modernization, it was already outdated compared to contemporary aircraft like the Boeing 777 and Airbus A340. Its range and fuel efficiency was a colossal disappointment (its range was 500 miles short of what was promised), and its autopilot and controls could be sensitive. But most problematic was its small horizontal stabilizers, which made it not only unstable and hard to control, but meant that it had to land at a higher speed than any other commercial airliner. As a result, there were three separate occasions in which an MD-11 landed too hard, causing the plane to flip over and crash. By the time it was built, McDonnell Douglas was on its last legs (due in no small part to the MD-11's poor sales), and was on the verge of being bought out by Boeing, which only briefly continued production of the MD-11 for the freight market before ending production in 2000 after twelve years, during which time only 200 were built (less than half the number of DC-10s produced).
• And before the DC-10, there was the first commercial jet airliner ever built, the de Havilland Comet. While its eye-catchingly sleek design was radical at the time of its launch in 1952, there was a literal Fatal Flaw: metal fatigue in the areas around the plane's windows when the cabin was pressurized due to the plane's thin skin. The result was three deadly accidents within twelve months of the plane's launch as the overstressed fuselages burst in flight. The Comet was subsequently grounded for four years while de Havilland revised the plane's design. But only a few weeks after the redesigned Comet took to the skies, it was rendered outdated by the likes of the Boeing 707 and the Douglas DC-8, and its sales and reputation never recovered.
• The Comet's troubles were seen as a golden opportunity for the Soviets to debut their own jet airliner, the Tupolev Tu-104. In order to produce the plane in half the Comet's development time and cost, as he had promised the Soviet leadership, developer Andrei Tupolev borrowed the engine, wing, and tail designs from his Tu-16 heavy bomber to supplement the Tu-104 design. The central fuselage of the Tu-104 was wider than that of the Tu-16, which caused the plane's center of gravity to shift rearward depending on how the aircraft was loaded; this left the Tu-104 extremely vulnerable to atmospheric updrafts, which could cause the plane to pitch upward and stall, and the Tu-16-made tail was not powerful enough to counteract those forces. But even after this design flaw was rectified (following two fatal crashes) the Tu-104 was notoriously prone to runway overshoots due to the fact that it was designed without thrust reversers or brakes. The plane's reputation became so poor among Soviet air travelers that it was the subject of a satirical folk song set to Fryderyk Chopin's "Funeral March".
• The Beechcraft Bonanza appeared in 1947 but looks like it was designed much later. The "V" tail, retractable landing gear, and its sleek lines could make its pilot the envy of the flight line. The problem was that "V" tail and its unique landing gear. The aircraft was snapped up by lots of new pilots with money, particularly doctors. Accidents involving the Bonanza, including the infamous crash that killed Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and The Big Bopper, gave it the nickname "The Fork Tailed Doctor Killer". While the aircraft didn't have a higher accident rate, the "V" tail was a structural weakness compared to a regular "inverted T" tail - improper repairs or simple wear and tear could cause aerostatic flutter. There were issues with the retractable landing gear that stained the aircraft's reputation even after Beechcraft fixed the problem. The plane's narrow center of gravity didn't help matters. Today the original V-tailed aircraft is popular, but sits squarely in the Awesome, but Impractical realm - it needs a lot of inspections and experience to keep it airworthy. The Boring, but Practical inverted "T" tail version of the Bonanza is a huge success.
• If it's possible for a drone to qualify for this, the Lockheed D-21 definitely counts. Powered by a state-of-the-art ramjet engine, it was designed to fly high and fast to spy on China, returning its camera to the ground by parachute and then self-destructing. Because it couldn't take off on its own, the D-21 had to be air launched from the back of an SR-71 Blackbird. That's when disaster struck; on the D-21's fourth test flight, it collided with its carrier plane, killing the copilot. An operational version called the D-21B was eventually put into service, but it made just 17 flights, and only four of those resulted in any film being returned. The rest all either crashed or failed to return their film, including one especially humiliating incident where the film capsule was rammed and destroyed by the very same ship that had been sent to retrieve it! And just to top it all off, Richard Nixon's diplomacy with China made the D-21 unnecessary a few years later.

Spacecraft

• The American Vanguard rocket was a rush job by the U.S. Navy to try to clinch the glory of launching the first orbital spacecraft for themselves. Delays in the Vanguard's first launch resulted in Sputnik beating them in October 1957. The first launch attempt (December 6, 1957) exploded on the launch pad. Only three Vanguard rockets succeeded at reaching orbit out of 11 attempts, with the first one beaten by the U.S. Army's Juno I rocket by about six weeks.
• The Juno II rocket wasn't very successful, either. One of the most infamous stock rocket failure clips is a Juno II failure on July 16, 1959, where the rocket pitched over immediately after liftoff, and was destroyed by range safety. Only five of its 10 launches made it into space.
• In 1962, Mariner 1 failed to achieve orbit because of a programming error in the Atlas rocket's first stage. It would've been sent to Venus.
• The Apollo command and service module, specifically the Block I version, was known for this for one gigantic glaring issue: the planned launch environment. North American Aviation wanted it to launch with a highly pressurized pure oxygen atmosphere, slowly bleeding it off from 16.7 psi (about 15% higher than sea level atmospheric pressure, and six times as much oxygen as is in the atmosphere at sea level) to 5 psi (about 40% of sea level atmospheric pressure, but still twice the oxygen). The NASA program manager in charge of Apollo, Joseph Shea, demanded that all unnecessary flammable materials be removed from the intended first manned Apollo capsule, Apollo 204. Whether or not they complied is murky. The astronauts - Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, Edward White, and Roger Chaffee - did not trust North American in this regard. In the end, during a "plugs-out" test at Launch Complex 34, Cape Kennedy Air Force Station, Florida, on January 27, 1967, a spark ignited the fully pressurized atmosphere in Apollo 204, and the inferno resulted in the pressure inside being too high to open the capsule in time. All three astronauts died. The Block II module was already in production and intended to start out with a natural atmosphere at launch, being vented during ascent (the astronauts wearing spacesuits), before being closed up and re-pressurized to pure oxygen at 5 psi.
• The Soviet Union's Soyuz 7K-OK spacecraft was rushed into production after numerous delays because of desires to conduct manned spacecraft operations as part of the 50th Anniversary of the October Revolution. Soyuz 1 was launched in the early morning hours of April 23, 1967, with experienced cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov on-board. At the time of launch, it is estimated there were 203 known defects with the spacecraft. Both Komarov and his friend Yuri Gagarin agreed that the Soyuz 1 craft was a deathtrap and that manning its launch was a suicide mission. A series of malfunctions forced the mission to abort early, and it was the last defect that was the fatal one: the parachutes failed to deploy on re-entry, killing Komarov instantly as he hit the ground.
• The Soviet Igla docking system became infamous for its faults. The following missions were aborted because of its failures:
  • Soyuz 7 and Soyuz 8 in 1969
  • Soyuz 10 with Salyut 1 in 1971 (not to be confused with Soyuz 11, which was a completely different kind of failure, and generally regarded as a freak accident)
  • Soyuz 15 with Salyut 3 in 1974
  • Soyuz 23 with Salyut 5 in 1976
  • The systems did improve enough that Igla suffered no mission-ending failures during Salyut 6 or Salyut 7 in the 1980s. It was replaced by the Kurs system on Mir, which is still used on the Russian side of the International Space Station.
• Then there was the Soviet analogue of the Saturn V rocket, the N1. An overcomplicated jumble of 30 engines all managed by a primitive computer system that had a tendency to erroneously shut down engines, and the Soviets decided to save on the ground tests by putting it directly into service. The result? Four failed launches, including one that stalled seconds into flight and fell back to the pad, obliterating it in a near-nuclear level explosion.
• The Soviet Union had a long list of failures in attempts to send probes to Mars. ^note (They actually had a long list of failures in virtually all of their early space programs, as that's how they tested things. What's notable about the Soviet Mars program was the distinct lack of successes.) One probe, Mars 3 in 1971, was able to get a lander to the surface of Mars, but it only lasted a few seconds, returning just a single scrambled image. Not even The New Russia has been spared this; as recently as 2011, a joint Russian-Chinese mission called Fobos-Grunt failed to leave its low-Earth parking orbit. Ironically, they have a long history of success with probes to Venus, as a total of nine landers in their Venera and Vega programs reached that planet's surface. They survived a hellish environment - with an atmospheric pressure around 90 times higher than Earth, and temperatures exceeding 460 °C (860 °F), in a composition best described as vaporized battery acid - for as much as two hours each time. ^note (Even then, about half the intended missions to Venus failed. There was even a lack of success on the lander for Vega 2, which began operations prematurely during descent, and didn't survive to the surface of Venus.) As of 2023, the only truly successful Russian Mars probe has been the ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter, developed in collaboration with the ESA. It was to have been followed by a rover launched in 2022, but this was cancelled because of Russia's invasion of Ukraine in that year.
• The Hubble Space Telescope was almost relegated to this, as it was discovered that its primary reflector mirror had a slight imperfection, resulting in blurry images. This was lampooned in The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, as it was put in a museum along with other historical disasters like the Hindenburg and the Titanic. But it was also designed to be repaired in-orbit, and they figured out corrective optics to fix the issue. The flaw was compensated for initially by a general optic called COSTAR in 1993. Subsequent repair missions would replace all the other instruments with corrective optics as well, and COSTAR would be returned to Earth after the final repair mission in 2009.
• Mars Observer was a NASA probe destined to orbit Mars. Launched on September 25, 1992, but contact was lost only three days before it was scheduled to enter orbit around Mars. It is believed that a fuel tank ruptured.
• The American Delta III rocket is best described as a hulked-up version of the venerable Delta II rockets of the time, with more-powerful solid rocket boosters and an enlarged second stage powered by liquid hydrogen. All three launch attempts, one per year from 1998 to 2000, ended in failure, with the first failure being due to an issue with the new boosters and the latter two resulting from issues with the new second stage. Boeing decided to end development in favor of the Delta IV. Its larger solid-rocket motors were used on an uprated version of the Delta II, while a stretched version of the upper stage was used on the Delta IV (meaning that the only Delta III components which outlived the Delta III program were the ones that had been responsible for the Delta III's launch failures).
• The ARCAspace Eco Rocket is a supposedly "eco-friendly" first stage for orbital launch, which has become something of a joke in the space community for using battery-heated steam for propulsion - a technique providing so little specific impulse that it could reduce delta-v requirement for later stages by extremely marginal amounts at best. Given that the CEO is currently under investigation for fraud, it's unclear if it's actually meant to work at all.
• The Conestoga rocket series was the product of Houston-based firm Space Services Inc. of America, intended as a low-cost satellite launch system and comprised of surplus Minuteman II ICBM stages with additional strap-on boosters. The end result was a cheaply constructed shitbox with a horrible reliability record that looked like a Delta II rocket that had been hacked off at the first stage and fitted with an oddly-proportioned payload fairing. The Conestoga series only saw use three times before the program was officially cancelled, with the third and final launch ending in catastrophic failure when the rocket's flight computer malfunctioned and triggered its automatic self-destruct system. It's worth noting that during this launch, the Conestoga carried an advertisement for the movie Last Action Hero - except that due to technical issues with the rocket, it didn't actually launch until after the movie had already flopped in theaters.

Rail Transport

• The British Rail Class 17, otherwise known as Clayton Type 1s, were notorious for engine troubles due to the twin Paxman engines inside being unreliable and prone to overheating, and visibility being very poor. Most of them only saw a life of less than five years before they were withdrawn, and only one Class 17 was preserved. The locomotive's problems were the inspiration for the Thomas & Friends episode "Double Teething Troubles", where a new diesel by the name of "Derek", who is based off the Class 17, is mentioned to have problems with his cooling system.
• The British Rail Class 28, also known as the Metropolitan Vickers Diesel Electric Type 2 or simply the Metrovick, is notorious for its use of Crossley diesel engines, being severely prone to failure. To quote Wikipedia: "The engines burnt and leaked oil, had underfed bearings, vibrated and popped heads and pistons, and suffered from ring scuffing", as well as frequently releasing unacceptable levels of smoke. This led to abhorrent reliability in service. Also of note was the unbalanced nature of the locomotive, and the initial tendency for the cab windows to fall out. Withdrawals commenced in 1967, with the last going in September 1968 after only ten years of service.
• The Advanced Passenger Train was a proposal for an advanced high speed train that promised to bring Britain's then-antiquated rail structure into the modern age. This would be accomplished by the use of an experimental tilting mechanism that would allow it ride on the often-twisty existing tracks rather than requiring specially built tracks like the Shinkansen or TGV. Unfortunately, the APT was rushed into service with little time given to test it. As a result, the tilting mechanism rarely worked like it was supposed to, and passengers often reported suffering motion sickness, giving the train the nickname "the queasy rider". In one promotional video, presenter Peter Purves praises the APT's ride quality amidst rattling dishes and a cup of coffee on the verge of spilling. Despite several attempts to fix these issues, the APT project was ultimately abandoned in favor of high-speed diesel trains. In light of this setback, the APT's designers sold the patent for the tilting system to Fiat, who eventually managed to perfect the technology, allowing tilting trains to be reintroduced into Britain over two decades later.
• The British Rail Pacer holds a reputation across frequent users of English and Welsh branch lines as the train of nightmares. Adopted in the 1980s, the intention was to produce a line of cheap DMU's to replace the ageing units across the network that often dated back to the 50's or 60's, and to provide a holdover until more advanced trains could be built. To cut costs, they were effectively a bus chassis mounted on railway wheels. The first Pacer, the Class 140, was a Super Prototype that failed to be as cheap as British Rail hoped, so its mass-produced descendants (the Class 141, 142, 143, and 144) made massive sacrifices to passenger comfort and build quality. Common complaints include terrible suspension, uncomfortable seating poorly-suited to lengthy rides, and non-existent noise insulation that often made wheel screeching unbearable. Also not helping matters is that the Pacers were followed shortly afterwards by the Sprinters (the Class 150, 153, 156, and 158/9), which were a massive upgrade in terms of performance and comfort, and thanks to their Boring, but Practical designs are still in use today. Despite the success of the Sprinters, they weren't produced in high enough quantities to completely replace the Pacer fleets, and so despite only intended to have short service lives it ultimately took until 2021 for them to finally be out of service, driven mostly by updated accessibility requirements rendering them illegal to operate without being coupled to a Sprinter. Several units were donated to heritage railways across the UK, leaving a muddled legacy among the country's rail users and enthusiasts.
• The Alco Century 855 was the most powerful diesel locomotive at the time it was built, and the most powerful locomotive built by the venerable company, with a whopping 5,550 HP. However, the units were notorious for overheating and had poor performance with their twin prime movers that essentially relegated them to staying in service around North Platte, Nebraska, so they'd always be close to a large engine shop to see to their constant maladies. Union Pacific retired and scrapped all examples of this locomotive after less than eight years of service.
• The General Electric U50C, which was part of the famed Universal Series locomotives made by GE, was powerful at 5,000 hp, but suffered from numerous problems stemming from a desire to save weight. Firstly, they were outfitted with three-axle trucks when they really should have had four, causing the cast frames to develop stress cracks. Another weight-saving measure was the use of aluminum for the electrical wiring, even though aluminum is much more likely to overheat, have connection issues, and otherwise fail in this application than traditional copper. Union Pacific rewired one unit with copper as an experiment and considered having an outside contractor rewire all the other units in an attempt to save the class, but it wasn't to be. Aside from these issues, the engines routinely developed low oil pressure, coolant leaks, and the dynamic brake grids were prone to melting. They were withdrawn by 1976 after only 5-7 years of service. After a short stint serving as stationary power generators due to a coal miners' strike in 1978, all were scrapped.
• The majority of steam turbine locomotives had problems that would relegate them to mere novelty status. Those with mechanical transmissions tended to have problems getting up to speed and were more complex than typical steam locomotives. Steam-electric turbine locomotives had issues with ash and soot fouling their powered bogies, and a few of those engines even caught fire due to electrical failures.
• High-pressure steam locomotives were built on the premise that raising boiler pressures would give better performance even if the cylinders and running gear weren't changed. Their unusual boilers generally suffered from being overstressed. The London, Midland, and Scottish Railway's high-pressure prototype, named Fury, killed a boiler inspector on the footplate when a steam pipe burst, sending high-pressure steam and live coals from the firebox smack through the cab. The engine's own crewmen were injured by the same blast, but survived.
• The British Rail 10100, known more commonly as the Fell locomotive, could best be called unreliability made manifest. The locomotive had six engines - four for propulsion and two for auxiliary equipment - and a mechanical transmission that was extremely overstressed. It was left out of action for over a year when a single loose bolt hit the gearbox and severely damaged it, and it was withdrawn in 1958 (after not even a decade of service) when the carriage heating boiler caught fire at Manchester station.
  • Built only a year before the 10100 was the British Rail 10800, which broke down so often (it had a 40% chance of breaking down on a given day) that it was nicknamed "The Wonder Engine" from the daily query of "I wonder if it will go today". It was also withdrawn after less than a decade in service.
• It's actually quite hard to build a steam locomotive that doesn't work, at least when following the most basic design guidelines for one. Hurricane and Thunderer were very good tries though. More Processions than locomotives, these two sisters suffered from extremely little adhesive weight on the driving wheels, meaning they couldn't move themselves without slipping, yet alone a train worth more than their running costs. Both locomotives only lasted two years in service, although Hurricane's boiler was reused on another locomotive.
• In the 1880s, Francis W. Webb designed three remarkable classes of express steam locomotives for the London & North Western Railway, the Experiment Class, the Dreadnought Class and the Teutonic Class, which did work, but barely so. One thing all three classes had in common was that they were three-cylinder compound locomotives with two driving axles. The high-pressure cylinders drove the second driving axle, and one huge low-pressure cylinder drove the leading driving axle.
  You've read that right. The leading driving axle was powered by only one cylinder. Nothing too unusual, weren't it for the fact that the two driving axles weren't coupled and could spin independently from one another.
  The leading driving axle ended up causing trouble often enough. Sometimes it ran into the opposite direction of the second driving axle. And when it stood in the dead center (which a locomotive shouldn't have), the high-pressure cylinders and the one remaining driving axle had to start up the train and the leading driving axle with it. Occasionally, a crowbar was required to get the leading driving axle to do what it was supposed to do. Attempts at stopping the locomotive with the low-pressure piston not in the dead center were hit-and-miss because its driving gear could impossibly be observed from the cab.
  In 1903, George Whale took over from Webb as chief mechanical engineer. Not even three years later, all 80 locomotives of these classes were withdrawn.
• Through the 2000s and early 2010s, the Italian train manufacturer AnsaldoBreda became notorious for producing a series of trains that were difficult to work with thanks to a mix of poor engineering and the occasional bout of old-fashioned corruption, to the point where it eventually killed the company when it was bought out by Hitachi Rail and turned into Hitachi Rail Italy.
  • The 4000 Series created for the Washington Metro by a pre-merger Breda, in spite of being an evolution of the prior 2000 and 3000 Series trains also built by the company, proved to be unreliable with a critical flaw that would see their doors open while the train was moving. The 4000 Series was retired in 2017, while its predecessors were refurbished and kept in service until the mid-2020s.
  • The SL95 was built for the Oslo tram network, and suffered many issues often stemming from its electrical and air supply systems not being well suited to winter conditions, something kind of important when you are building a tram specifically for Oslo. Other issues included the wheels wearing down quickly (on a few occasions after just a single day of service), and a contract dispute stemming from the vehicles being louder in operation than what the tender specified. They will be fully retired in 2024 as part of a complete replacement of the Oslo tram fleet after just 24 years in operation; the SL79 it serves alongside will have lasted 42 years in service by comparison.
  • The Sirio built for Gothenburg's tram network suffered from a chassis that would rapidly deteriorate and cause damage to both the train and the track due to the poor materials used, with AnsaldoBreda being found liable for the cost of repairs in court.
  • Pre-refurbishment, the V250 "Fyra" were so unreliable that it played a major role in its manufacturer's demise. Built for Brussels-Amsterdam high-speed services, it won the contract by being faster than the tender specification (as the name implies, having a top speed of 250km/h vs. the tender's 220km/h target) and cheaper than its competitors. After a delay of over four years over its initial delivery date, the trains had an abysmal punctuality rate of less than 50%, and after just 39 days they were pulled from passenger service after the Belgian railway authority suspended their safety certification upon discovering that their undercarriages had a habit of falling apart at high speeds. Thankfully, the trains were able to redeem themselves after a refurbishment by Trenitalia, who rebranded them as the ETR 700 and put them to work on their high-speed services along Italy's Adriatic coast to much greater reliability and success. The Fyra's replacement in The Netherlands, the Alstom-produced Intercity Next Generation, entered service at the start of 2023, 10 years after Fyra's failure. The ICNG is weaker than the Fyra on the on-paper technical side, being capable of only 200km/h, but is intended to be operable on a much wider range of routes and is also based on the proven Coradia Stream platform rather than being a custom design.
  • If the V250 didn't kill the company by itself, then the IC4 built for Denmark's intercity services certainly helped. Originally set for delivery in 2003, it took until late 2008 for them to finally enter regular service as the process of completing the regulatory approval for them proved to be a very lengthy process, not helped by the fact that the IC4 itself was a completely bespoke design. Even in-service, it took another few years for the trains to be approved for use as coupled units, by which point the slow delivery of the trains resulted in AnsaldoBreda being locked out of maintaining the trains and being required to refund half the value of the contract they had won. This story also saw a bizarre tangent when one of the IC4 trains built turned up in Libya, where it had been gifted to Gadaffi to celebrate 40 years of his rule and still carried some of the signs that the trainset was supposed to be delivered to Denmark instead.
• The PRR Class T1 is undoubtedly one of the most awesome looking locomotives out there, but also a great example as to why looks aren't everything. Although both powerful and fast, their valve setup couldn't handle high speed, leading to the class being kept to 100mph or less. Not that this stopped locos appearing in the shops with valve damage so bad repairmen thought they broke the steam speed record and then some. The valves as a whole proved to be severely limiting, as they couldn't handle the engine at its best without being torn apart. What made matters worse was a very long set of rigid frames, keeping them off the windy mountain lines where their power could be utilized best. The last one was withdrawn in 1956, although a replica is under construction.
• The LB&SCR E2 is iconic today for being the tank engine that Thomas was based on, but in the real world they generally had a sub-par reputation due to them never being properly equipped for any particular purpose. Intended for shunting duties, in practice their water tanks were too small for sustained use and their wheelbase too large to be put to effective use on the often-compact dockland railyards they were eventually consigned to. Attempts to have them work longer freight and passenger services were foiled by their small coal bunkers, and for the latter the poor ride quality at higher speeds due to oscillation. Braking was also a reported issue on these engines, with the original air brake pumps being too strong in their application while the engine's own steam brakes remained too weak, a fact that served as an inspiration for "Thomas and the Trucks". While the E2s did survive in-service for a good length of time, this was largely due to Southern Railway's extensive electrification of their network and their subsequent unwillingness to invest in new steam engines, and it is noteworthy that no E2 was preserved.
  • The problems with the E2 could have been resolved with better boilers (to conserve on coal while giving better steaming qualities), redesigned cylinders (to harmonically match the wheel size), and perhaps a central wheel set without flanges (to resolve the problem of going around curves). But when those improvements were proposed, Britain found itself fighting World War II, thus the improvements were never implemented.
• The Holman locomotives could be described as steam locomotives wearing roller skates. Any casual onlooker would know they wouldn't work, and a thorough investigation ended with many boilermakers concluding that Holman was only seeking to defraud investors who weren't very knowledgeable about how steam locomotives actually ran. Very thankfully, Holman's designs failed and were converted into conventional engines, with Mr. Holman shunned out of public life altogether.
• There are few ways to describe the Southern Railway's Leader that could come off positively. The locomotive, designed as a replacement for ageing tank engines, featured a whole host of new and experimental technology, the vast majority of which refused to work. Experimental features included a new kind of running gear, which could seize up and totally stop the locomotive, which would require a heavy-duty crane for recovery as the thing weighed 150 tons. Adding to this, the fireman's cab could only be accessed on one side, which meant if the top-heavy locomotive fell on that side, he was trapped. Out of 5 planned locomotives, only two were completed and one ever actually tested, with none surviving today.
• Building articulated locomotives with only one set of cylinders, as done in Germany a few times, sounded like a great idea because it made them simpler in a way, well, until replacement parts got hard to come by.
  One attempt was by Hagans shortly after the Turn of the Century. Locomotives like the Prussian T 13 got two trailing axles that were driven from the actual drivers via "swinging levers". Then came World War I, replacements for broken levers were impossible to get, and many a Hagans locomotive was left with 50-60% of its tractive effort because the two trailing axles were basically turned into idlers. It also didn't help that, unlike the Klose steering, the Hagans mechanism sat within the frame, making it hard to reach for maintenance.
  The late 20s saw the arrival of the Luttermöller axle. Basically, 10-coupled locomotives were made by building 6-coupled locomotives with one additional axle ahead and one behind the normal drivers, coupled via cogwheels in such a way that they could move in curves. But the cogwheels wore out quickly under stress, and when World War II came around, it became impossile to get replacements for them. The main advancement over Hagans was that it wasn't necessarily both Luttermöller axles that had to be disabled due to lack of spare parts.
• When Germany started experimenting with diesels, it was still unclear how to get the power on larger locomotives from the pistons to the wheels. Mechanical transmissions were only good for small, weak and slow locomotives, small and weak because the technologies needed for sufficiently sturdy cogwheels wasn't there yet, and slow because it avoided the necessity of switching gears. Electric transmission wasn't ready for prime time yet, and it was deemed too heavy. And pneumatic and hydraulic transmission wasn't invented yet.
  One rather conservative prototype built by Krupp used direct transmissions. Its undercarriage was basically built like that of a three-cylinder steam locomotive with the piston rods being directly connected to one of the two driving axles. The cylinders were essentially diesel cylinders, but due to the way the locomotive was designed, they couldn't run at idle while the locomotive was standing. The whole thing had to be started up with compressed air to get going. The air reservoir, in turn, was replenished by a compressor driven by the engine that also propelled the locomotive. In other words, no compressed air refilling when the locomotive stood still.
  After the locomotive itself proved to be somewhat reliable, it was tested on regular local passenger trains. This meant a lot of stopovers with little running time in-between. This, in turn, meant that the locomotive used up the compressed air more quickly than the compressor could replenish it, leading to the locomotive being unable to start up again after a few stopovers, and a steam locomotive having to come and tow the train. Mainline diesel traction itself was shelved after this failure for several years until new experiments with an even more conservative diesel-pneumatic locomotive were carried out.
• Of the mighty German class 45 freight locomotives, only one remained in East Germany, 45 024. It was converted into an experimental high-pressure locomotive, H 45 024. One could argue that this was already reason enough for its failure, but it actually managed to get even worse. The design is said to have been outstanding for a high-pressure steam locomotive. It was the conversion itself that was completely and utterly botched. Post-conversion, the locomotive had a service life of a whopping 13 kilometers. On its first trial run, it broke down after nine kilometers, and on the second and last one, it only lasted for four.
• The class V 80, the first new diesel design for the German Federal Railway, was the first attempt at building a diesel-hydraulic locomotive on a pair of trucks. In other words, nothing like this had ever been done before. Its drivetrain went from a single prime mover to a hydro-dynamic gearbox in the middle of the locomotive and from there to one transfer gearbox in each truck. The diesel was first rated at 800hp, but that was much too little for the locomotives to replace the Prussian P 8, so the output power was raised to 1000hp.
  This, however, made the main weakness of the V 80 even worse. And that was the two long connecting shafts between the hydraulic gearbox and the transfer gearboxes which, for obvious reasons, didn't have any bearings between their two Cardan joints. Too much torque applied too quickly, and these things broke. The V 80 was so delicate that it had to be driven rather carefully which was difficult with only six speeds to choose from, and it wasn't allowed to pull freight trains anymore.
  Switching was difficult with the V 80, too. It had a center-cab design like many other European diesels that came after it, but it had a carbody that was as wide as the underframe over the entire length of the locomotive. It was next to impossible to see the ends of the locomotive from the cab. Having two engine rooms accessible from the cab via stairs wasn't quite maintenance-friendly either.
  The V 80 was a great lesson in how not to build a diesel locomotive. Most later designs would be built with narrow hoods on both sides of the cab which could be looked past from the cab, and which could be opened for maintenance. Diesel-hydraulics that came afterwards were also built with shorter and therefore sturdier shafts.
• The ICE series of trains manufactured for Deutsche Bahn include some of the most iconic and well-regarded trainsets of the modern era. Unfortunately, the ICE series contains one blight on the family: the ICE TD. A joint venture between Bombardier and Siemens, the TD is a diesel version of the far more successful ICE T, intended for non-electrified intercity routes and international services into Denmark. The TD, however, proved to be a cost sink in terms of reliability and maintenance, partially due to its mechanical complexity and partially because of legal quirks which kept it from qualifying for a tax exemption on its fuel. The TD was introduced into service in 2001: of the 20 ordered, one was written off immediately when it fell off an elevated platform during maintenance, a broken axle on another train in 2002 resulted in the whole fleet being turned in for maintenance, and by 2003 the TD was withdrawn from regular domestic use in order to focus on Germany-Denmark services in a deal that saw DSB buy some of the sets. The ultimate nail in the coffin was the existence of the Adtranz RegioSwinger, a trainset which DB had previously purchased dozens of, filled a similar niche as the TD (being a tilting diesel multiple-unit, just without the high-speed), and completely upstaged its big brother by just about every performance metric; DB switched to running RegioSwingers on the TD's routes and had little issues with doing so. In the end, the TD had an embarrassingly short lifespan when DB cancelled their lease to get rid of them and DSB refused to buy up what they had, and all of the trainsets were out of commercial service by 2017, with one example surviving as an experimental train to test new technologies.
• Early German electric locomotives tended to be rather experimental which led to a number of utter failures.
  • The one-of-a-kind Baden State Railways A¹ was one of the first mainline electric locomotives in Germany. Let's just say that it was this locomotive that taught engineers that mechanically syncing two electric motors via jointed coupling rods which also drive a number of locomotive axles is a bad idea. It had a dreadfully terrible ride due to this. And this wasn't its only bug: The only way to fix it was to remove one of the two motors, thus rendering the entire locomotive too weak for the line it had been made for.
  • The Altona harbor railway, operated by the Prussian State Railways, was electrified in 1911; previously, freight cars were moved uphill and downhill through the connecting tunnel by means of a winch and switched around by steam locomotives. It wasn't until 1923 that there was a worthy locomotive, and even then there was only really one.
    • First came the EV 1/2, a four-axle double locomotive which for some reason had one of its driving motors not installed upon delivery. It was so unreliable that it literally spent more time in the workshops being either modified or repaired than in service.
    • Next came another double locomotive, EV 3/4◊. Its main issue was that it was utterly, utterly underpowered in every possible way. Apparently, whoever designed this thing didn't take the ramp up from the harbor into account, much less that it led through a tunnel with poor ventilation. Everything on this locomotive overheated regularly, and repairs and spare parts were needed on a daily basis. In 1916, when the locomotive was only some four years old, it was decided not to repair it anymore after a motor burned out, and it was replaced with steam locomotives. The catenary stayed largely unused unless EV 1/2 happened to not be broken for a change.
    • It wasn't until 1923 that EV 5 appeared, the first useful electric locomotive on the line. The same year, however, the former Baden State Railways A¹ was sold to the Prussians (actually, both were parts of the Deutsche Reichsbahn now) who dumped it on the Altona harbor railway. With only one motor left due to how poorly it ran with two. The local staff didn't even bother to put it into service anymore, so it was scrapped that year. (By the way, one more locomotive appeared the next year, EV 6, but it was rather Cool, but Inefficient as it was completely overengineered for its tasks. It was mostly kept as a fallback for EV 5.)
  • The main issue of the Prussian EG 501 from 1912 was that it was conceived for slower and heavier trains than what it was designed for. For one, it had way too few speeds to choose from, and these speeds weren't adjusted in a way that was useful for freight trains. It also had removable side wall panels to facilitate the maintenance of the two big motors, but from constantly hauling heavy goods trains at low speeds during its trial runs, the motors heated up so much that the panels eventually had to be removed altogether. At least, the designers had learned from the A¹ not to put too many joints (and no wheels) on the coupling rods between the motors. Still, it was such a failure that it was never put into service.
• After some catastrophic rail disasters, especially in late World War I, in which entire passenger trains went up in flames, it was decided by many railway companies to build new passenger cars completely out of steel with no wood in the carbody. It took German manufacturers until 1927 to switch to all-steel passenger cars outside of express train rolling stock which had gone all-steel by 1921. However, even when they churned out thousands of new two-axle passenger cars which essentially took over most non-suburban mainline local services, they didn't really know how to do just that. With only one set of leaf springs between the wheels and the carbody and no insulating or dampening materials - because nobody knew that these would be required - these new cars tended to resonate rather loudly with the wheel noises. They weren't called "Donnerbüchsen" ("thunder boxes") for nothing.
• Swiss Federal Railways (SBB-CFF-FFS):
  • Trains between Switzerland and France had (and sometimes still have) to change their locomotive at or near the border. While Switzerland is electrified with 15kV AC, southern France used to have 1500V DC in general. When the line crossing the border was electrified in 1956, the most convenient place for a locomotive change on trains near the border was Geneva. But it is not on the border; there's still a 15km stretch of track with further villages and towns, and therefore stations, which was electrified with 1500V DC.
    The BDe 4/4 II EMUs were acquired for these services. Two of them seemed easily enough for that short stretch of track, but they were utterly underpowered and thus constantly overstrained. Often, both units were out of service at the same time. For more than two decades, the primary replacement was the one-of-a-kind, tri-current Ae 4/6 III, converted from the experimental gas turbine locomotive Am 4/6. But this thing was an even more horrible clunker, so frequently it was in the workshops along with both BDe 4/4 II. Fallback for the fallback were small, three-axle switchers with no head-end power, so the trains often ran with no heating until a coach was fitted with a pantograph and a transformer for train heating in 1977. In 1988, the SBB-CFF-FFS acquired a number of V 200⁰ diesel locomotives from the German Federal Railway which were about as old as the BDe 4/4, "modernized" them, labeled them Am 4/4, and sent some to Geneva. These former West German star locomotives, however, turned out to basically be polished pieces of junk and themselves were so unreliable that small switchers were still needed as fallback. Oh, and the Am 4/4 lacked head-end power too, and the Swiss loathe diesel rolling stock with a burning passion in general. A solution was found in 1995 by finally replacing the BDe 4/4 II with brand-new EMUs.
  • As mentioned above, the second Am 4/4. They were built for the German Federal Railway in The '50s as their famous V 200⁰. In the late '80s, the SBB-CFF-FFS bought seven of them, gave them an overhaul and labeled them Am 4/4. They were originally intended for construction trains. However, at this time, these locomotives had already been three decades old and spent the last round about four years of these on a junkyard. The Swiss crews found them to be "polished scrap metal" and terribly unreliable.
  • The Ae 4/6 must have been the company's single most unpopular domestic locomotives ever. It was made for express trains on the Gotthard mountain route. But it was made in the middle of World War II, and so it had to be made from sub-par materials such as aluminum instead of copper for the wiring. The drives were rather loud. The slide bearings were prone to overheat. As soon as enough Ae 6/6 were available, the Ae 4/6 left the Gotthard to be used on lighter trains elsewhere, also because they didn't carry enough weight on their drivers for heavier services. These locomotives were so bad that, unusually for Switzerland, not a single one was preserved.
• Dutch Railways (NS):
  • Up until the late '40s, the Dutch Railways only had EMUs (a lot of these, actually), but no electric locomotives. This was to change; locomotive-hauled passenger trains and freight trains were to be electrified, too. The first Dutch electric locomotives were the class 1000 which were inspired by the Swiss Ae 4/6 mentioned above. Stupid decision, you might say now. But the 1000, the first three of which were actually made in Switzerland, became Alleged Locomotives for wholly different reasons. For one, the drives were maintenance hogs and at the same time so complicated that they were difficult to maintain. Also, the wheel arrangement was good for the curvy lines in mountainous Switzerland, especially the Gotthard line, but the short rigid wheelbase gave the locomotives such an uncomfortable ride beyond 80kph (50mph) on the rather straight lines in the rather flat Netherlands that the locomotives were only used on freight trains anymore from 1953 on.
  • The NS had new couchette cars built only once, and those were the Plan N from 1958, built for overnight express trains and holiday trains. Popular, however, they weren't. In their daytime configuration each compartment had eight seats, but in their nighttime configuration it only had six berths, so only three out of four seats could be booked. Also, the ventilation blew fresh air from outside straight at the passengers on the top berths. Mind you, these cars were used on Winter holiday trains as well. The cars were nowhere as comfortable as newer French or German couchettes, and so they were rebuilt into regular passenger coaches in 1971 and mostly withdrawn from international services.
  • In the late 1970s, the NS acquired a number of older couchette cars from the German Federal Railway to convert them into buffet cars for holiday trains. It was generally thought that they wouldn't need that many windows anymore. On the first car, so many windows were welded shut that the restaurant area was left with only three, rendering it rather gloomy and making it hard for the passengers to look outside. The other "croquette carts" weren't that much better in this regard.
• The USSR built many of the largest vehicles in the world, from the late AN-225 to the downright ridiculous Mil V12. Of course, locomotives too had to be big and so the AA20 was constructed. Built to outsize Union Pacific's 12 coupled locos, it was a massive locomotive with 14 driving wheels on one set of frames. Unfortunately, its massive size ended up being its undoing, as it was extremely heavy, would derail on any corner in existence, broke every set of points it crossed, was too large for turntables, broke the couplings on every train it pulled, and was a rather poor steamer, ironically due to an undersized firebox. The locomotive never entered service, and was only briefly paraded in Moscow around 1935 before being put in storage. It was scrapped in 1960.
• After the Kaprun disaster, the design of the Gletscherbahn Kaprun 2 was examined and found to be beyond dangerous, only meeting contemporary safety standards because those standards were hopelessly outdated. It used a domestic fan heater not intended for a moving vehicle, which was modified in a way that invalidated its safety certification; the hydraulic lines were made of plastic and way too close to the heater; there were no redundant systems in case the hydraulics were to fail, causing the doors to be stuck shut; there was no easy way to break the windows to evacuate; and there was no way for passengers to contact the conductor in an emergency. The fan heater's heating element overheated, dropped from its mounting, and made contact with the plastic housing, which set it on fire; leaking hydraulic fluid dripped into the fire, exacerbating it; and the train was made of fibreglass and plastic, which spread the fire throughout the train. Even the emergency stop, the one addition that wasn't utterly stupid, made things worse, as it stopped the train right in the middle of the tunnel, leaving smoke and heat nowhere to go but the upper station.
• The R46 train fleet still used by the New York City Subway was once described as "the most troubled cars ever purchased" as it was plagued with several manufacturing issues from the start. Pullman Standard, the train manufacturer contracted to build this 754-car fleet, delivered them behind schedule due to a labor strike in 1977, but that was just the start. Design flaws such as cracks on the train bogies^note later traced to Pullman Standard using a faulty design created by a third party that they were under the impression had been cleared in testing. In reality, it was just a prototype and had never been tested and the faulty P-wire brake controls^note which were to be used for high speeds along the IND Second Avenue Line, which didn't open until the first phase opened in 2017 after spending over 90 years on the drawing board. Train shop workers were also undertrained on the brake system's convoluted design (which sometimes stalled the train while it was in operation) limited the R46 fleet's usage to rush hours only in the 1980s. This caused the MTA to sue Pullman Standard for $80 million in damages. The various issues surrounding the R46 order not only forced the MTA to reuse older train cars for the time being, but also put Pullman Standard out of the passenger car business for good. In order to improve their reliability, the MTA overhauled the entire fleet by replacing their trouble-prone braking systems and train bogies.

Watercraft

• The 17th-Century Swedish warship Vasa, oh so so so much. Eager to project his country's imperial ambitions, King Gustavus II Adolphus wanted the vessel to be as extravagant and heavily armed as possible. Unfortunately, the King's demands resulted in a ship that was too large and unstable. To make matters worse, her hull was found to be too narrow, with the chief of construction insisting on widening the hull by one-and-a-half feet; it needed more, but the construction had advanced too far for even this to be feasible. To make matters even more worse, the construction of the port side was made by Swedish carpenters and that of the starboard by Dutch - the Swedes used the Swedish foot (296.9 mm) divided into 12 inches (24.74 mm) as the base unit, while the Dutch used the Amsterdam foot (283.1 mm) divided into 11 inches (25.73 mm); the hull has been found to be crooked and asymmetric. The end result? Vasa was foundered by moderate wind only minutes into her maiden voyage in 1628, sinking in Stockholm harbor. Her largely intact hull was salvaged in 1961 and now serves as a museum ship.
• The replacement of wooden ships and cannons with turreted ironclads in the late 19th Century saw a number of unsuccessful designs take to the seas. Among the worst was the Royal Navy's HMS Captain. Since large ships of the day still needed sails, the decision was made to mount the rigging on a separate deck above the main deck and its armament of two rotating turrets to allow them unobstructed lines of fire. This resulted in a very high center of gravity, which coupled with a very low freeboard to put the ship at great risk for capsizing. Despite several warnings of the inherent danger, lead designer Cowper Coles was unconvinced, and Captain was launched in March 1869. Shortly thereafter, in September 1870, she rolled over and capsized in a gale off the coast of Spain, killing 480 men. A subsequent investigation found the ship had indeed been dangerously unstable: a heeling motion of only 14 degrees would cause the edges of the main deck to touch the water, afterwards all self-righting motion in the hull was rapidly lost with recovery becoming impossible beyond 21 degrees. Coles would have no doubt faced severe penalties for his part in the debacle, had he not been one of the casualties himself.
• The Indiana-class battleship was designed by a panel of U.S. Navy officials rather than qualified engineers, and the result was such an Epic Fail that the ship became obsolete just five years after its launch. For starters, the designers chose to overload the mid-sized ship with as much armaments as possible - including four 13-inch guns, eight 8-inch guns, four 6-inch guns, twenty 6-pounder guns, six 1-pounder guns, and six 18-inch torpedo tubes - which caused weight distribution problems as the 13-inch guns (weighing a combined 544,000 pounds) caused the ship to list severely when their turrets were turned to one side. While the Indiana-class' armor was five inches thick at the water line, that armor was placed too low and did little to protect most of the vessel. Furthermore, the hull below the waterline remained unarmored and vulnerable; one ship, the U.S.S. Massachusetts (BB-2), nearly sank three separate times after hitting submerged objects. The hull itself was based on the decades-old Civil War-era Monitor design, which left little space between the deck and the waterline, meaning the deck was constantly in danger of being awash even in moderate conditions. The insistence of Congress that the cost be kept down, and opposition to imperialism or overseas engagements (which happened anyway) resulted in a coastal-defense battleship design, which was too small and had insufficient range for service on the open ocean. The ship's most critical flaw, however, was the lack of a bilge keel - the type of thing that would come in handy for a ship that frequently listed with the potential to roll - which wasn't installed because building a dry dock that could accommodate the keel would have driven up the ship's pricetag. After the Spanish-American War, all three ships were withdrawn from front-line service, being intermittently reactivated for training duty until they were deactivated for the last time in 1919.
• Even before her completion in 1890, the French ironclad Hoche went through a decade-long construction process which resulted in her being obsolete by the time she was ready for service. Like with the Indiana-class ships in America, her excessive guns and superstructure made her too top-heavy while her low freeboard made her unstable in anything but calm waters. On top of this, the ship had too many windows, which proved to be weak points in its armor. It was only after extensive refits which reduced her weight by 250 tons that the Hoche became much more seaworthy.
• The battleship Charles Martel and her half-sisters Carnot, Jaureguiberry, Massena, and Bouvet were little better. Their lozenge arrangement was overoptimised for short-range engagements in an era where engagement ranges were constantly increasing. Worse, their stability was possibly the worst of any warship put to sea - modern simulations show that the ships were more stable upside-down, with their stability described in those same simulations as hair-raising. Sure enough, when Bouvet struck a mine off the Dardanelles she capsized in under two minutes, taking all but 75 of her crew with her. By comparison, the British Ocean and Irresistible took hours to sink from similar damage.
• The Austrian Tegetthoff-class battleships are generally regarded as the worst dreadnought battleships built due to myriad design flaws, most of which were related to the designers trying to attempt to much on their limited displacement. While the oft-cited ventilation issues in the turrets are now believed to be a myth, the turrets were nonetheless cramped and unergonomic. Their stability was poor, to the point that a hard turn came perilously close to capsizing the ships. The weight of the gun turrets warped the keels and left the armor belt mostly underwater. The armor scheme had several dangerous gaps, most notably around the boiler uptakes. And in service they were short their design speed by a whopping three knots.
• The Chidori-class torpedo boat was Imperial Japan's attempt to get around the Washington Naval Treaty, signed among the Allies of World War I to place limits on naval construction, by making their vessels as lightweight as possible so that they could continue expanding their navy without technically violating the treaty. What they ended up with was a ship with myriad design flaws, the most serious being an excessive number of armaments placed on such a small and light platform. This led to disaster when, during an exercise in 1934, the torpedo boat Tomozuru capsized in heavy weather. The resulting scandal forced the Japanese navy to review the stability of all their ships, and the surviving Chidori vessels were extensively modified before seeing action in World War II.
• Britain's K-class submarine, intended to counter the threat of German U-boats during World War I, was instead a death trap so notorious that the constant stress of serving aboard them drove many submariners to alcoholism. The K-class' numerous problems began with its massive size (103m compared to the 42m typical for submarines of the period): when diving, the deck inadvertently acted as an extra hydroplane and pushed the nose down harder than intended, causing it to touch or even become lodged into the ocean floor while the stern protruded helplessly above-water. While normal submarines of the era could crash dive in 30 seconds to avoid danger, the K-class could only do so after five minutes on account of both its size and the time-consuming process of extinguishing its furnaces. The intense heat from the sub's massive steam engine necessitated ventilation funnels to be installed throughout the ship, but water frequently splashed into the funnels and, in the midst of swells, could either shut down the furnaces or trigger fatal blowbacks. Mushroom caps were supposed to close the funnels during dives to rectify this problem, but they were prone to mechanical failure and allowed water to flood the hull. Even in calm seas, if the oil pump wasn't turned off before a dive, it could flood the boiler room with oil and cause deadly fires. The oil tanks were built into the hull directly below the mess hall, and the panels were loose enough that the oil could seep through the floor. Even though the K-class handled clumsily and was involved in numerous fatal accidents, including the "Battle" of May Island which saw five subs either damaged or sunk (in transit, with no enemy action whatsoever), the Admiralty stubbornly refused to withdraw the class from service for over a decade following the war.
  • In the 1920s, a few K-class hulls were refitted into M-class submarines, which boasted a 12-inch 40-caliber gun mounted to the front of the conning tower. But the large gun made the already-unwieldly vessels more unstable and required the sub to resurface before it could be reloaded, in a process that took three minutes. Sure enough, the M-class became involved in the same types of accidents which blighted the K-class (including two fatal sinkings), finally convincing the Admiralty to pull the plug on both classes for good in 1932.
• The Italian Line's Doria class of ocean liners - the notorious Andrea Doria, her sister ship Cristoforo Colombo, and the larger Leonardo da Vinci - each had serious topweight problems, which led to each vessel having a relatively short life and was a contributing factor in Andrea Doria's sinking in 1956. (Ironically, the MS Stockholm, the small Swedish liner which sank Doria, is still in service as of 2021 as a cruise ship.)
• Russia's Admiral Kuznetsov, their flagship and one and only carrier, has been plagued with issues whenever it wasn't docked. Its engines are notoriously unreliable to the point it has to be escorted everywhere by at least one tugboat; the decision to run them on Mazut, the near-literal bottom of the barrel as far as fuels go, has only made things worse (on top of making it belch ridiculous amounts of smoke while active). Its top side fared little better, having enough breakdowns at least one airplane has run out of fuel and crashed waiting for repairs to be finished so they could finally land. The combined breakdowns have kept the ship under repairs without having been attacked even once; the only external damage it has taken was getting gouged by a falling crane when it accidentally sank its own floating drydock back in 2018, and it's been stuck in a land-based drydock ever since, catching on fire one year later. As of 2022, it remains there (catching on fire again on December 22), with rumors that parts of it have been completely sealed off with no actual records of what was left inside.
  • As an extra insult, it's also worth noting what happened to its sister ship, the Varyag. The Soviet Union collapsed while it was still under construction, and it fell into the ownership of Ukraine. Since Ukraine wasn't exactly in the financial position to finish the ship and had no real desire to own a carrier in any case, they sold the hull to China who eventually completed and commissioned the ship as the Liaoning in 2011. This in turn received its own sister ship, the Shandong. Both of those carriers have reportedly worked just fine in-service (aside from a steam leak during Liaoning's sea trials, which was soon fixed), indicating that the bulk of the Admiral Kuznetsov's problems lie with the Russian Navy.
• Another of Russia's vessels, the now-sunk missile cruiser Moskva, once believed to be the most advanced and powerful warship in the Black Sea, proved to be this when it was deployed to Ukraine. According to this maintenance report(untranslated version), "most powerful warship in the Black Sea" couldn't be further from the truth. To her credit, when she was newly built, she was actually quite the formidable vessel; Three-tier missile defense system, six anti-missile CIWS guns, advanced (for their era) S-300 radar guided SAM tubes, and a twin-linked 130mm cannon that could, in theory, work as an ad-hoc secondary CIWS, all moved by a pair of powerful gas turbine engines that could propel her up to a brisk 32 knots in calm conditions. Unfortunately, the years in the Soviet, then Russian navy were not kind to her. By 2023, none of the three-tier missile defense systems onboard Moskva were working properly; the short-range sea-to-air launchers didn't work; only one of the CIWS guns worked; the other five had been dismantled for spare parts; and while its S-300 batteries had all tubes functional, the radar they used for targeting interfered with the intercom, so most of the time it was left off (and even when on, it was unreliable), and the twin-linked 130mm cannon also didn't work. Most of the watertight doors leaked, only 50 fire extinguishers (out of the legally mandated 500) were onboard, and the safety equipment was all locked up with a key only the admiral had due to constant theft. Several of the engines were over 10,000 hours past replacement wear, and without express permission from the admiral it could only go half speed in emergencies. Many of the controls were nonfunctional, including the indicator lights for failures. The generators were old and worked at random, and the steering gear only allowed for very shallow turns for a vessel of its size. And the heat and aircon didn't work right. With all this in mind, it somewhat becomes more understandable why she wasn't seen outside the Black Sea since 2016, especially since her refit in that same year had to be cancelled due to lack of funding. With the Moskva barely a tired shadow of her once-proud self, her aging and malfunctioning anti-air defenses were easily duped by a drone, and the two anti-ship missiles that followed triggered both a blaze it couldn't put out and leaks that were impossible to stop, all problems the vessel was supposed to be equipped to handle.
• Going back to pre-Soviet times, we have the Russian monitor Novgorod and its sister ship, the Vitse-admiral Popov, dubiously renowned as two of the worst warships ever built. In a design that hadn't been done before (and hasn't been done since) the ship was designed with an almost perfectly circular hull, on the idea that this would reduce the total area needed for armor while improving maneuverability. Despite their highly unusual appearance, the monitors actually performed well in calm conditions and made for ideal gun platforms, firing at a full 360 degrees. However, steering proved nearly impossible owing to the fact that the ships didn't have bows (with the circular hulls causing immense drag and rendering the rudder useless) and on one occasion reportedly found themselves helplessly caught in the current of the Dnieper River and carried out to sea, with the spinning motion of the ships incapacitating the crew with vertigo. They were also known to roll in the less-than-calm waters of the Black Sea, and in a storm could be pitched enough to lift their six propellers out of the water. On top of this, the original turntable locks for the turrets (the guns were actually on two separate turntables to allow independent rotation) were too weak, causing the turrets to rotate uncontrollably from recoil^note (often misunderstood as the entire ship spinning uncontrollably). Ultimately, both ships were decommissioned in 1903 and scrapped in 1911.
• The Ocean Ranger was the poster child for No OSHA Compliance, to the point of being nicknamed the "Ocean Danger" by crew, and part of the reason was the design of the rig - specifically, the flat-out stupid decision to place the ballast control room on one of the columns rather than on deck. While problematic, this isn't inherently deadly on its own, but there was a porthole right next to the ballast control system that just so happened to be the only way to check the water level, making it extremely vulnerable to rogue waves, including one in February 1982 which broke the portlight and drenched the control room. The short-circuited control system either developed a mind of its own or misled the crew as to the state of ballast tanks, and by the time it became apparent what was happening, the pumps were unable to countermand the increasingly severe list because they weren't designed to handle this happening, resulting in the Ocean Ranger capsizing with the loss of all 84 crew members on board.
• While none of the Soviet Union's first generation of nuclear submarines were any great shakes - the Echo-class cruise missile submarines had to surface and remain surfaced to fire their missiles, and the November-class subs were noisy and plagued by steam generator defects - the Hotel-class stands out as a particularly lousy design. Like the Echo-class, they had to surface to fire their missiles, which the boats carried only three of and had to fire at suicidal proximity to the US East coast due to their short range. The reactors, however, were even more problematic. Lead ship K-19^note (yes, that K-19) suffered multiple fires, reactor accidents, and during trials saw her acoustic panels fall off. The nastiest incident was a 1961 loss of coolant, which after failure of the SCRAM and lacking a backup coolant loop nearly melted down were it not for the sacrifice of 22 crew to jury-rig a backup coolant loop. This earned the boat the nickname "Hiroshima". While the other boats were less prone to failure, their reputation in the Soviet Navy was set, and unlike their contemporary attack and cruise missile submarines were retired in the 1980s.
• During the American Civil War, Horace Lawson Hunley commissioned the design of three submarines for the Confederate States: the Pioneer, the American Diver, and the H. L. Hunley. The first was scuttled before even being finished, and the second was a miserable failure on multiple counts, but the Hunley might just be the worst for the sheer amount of crew it killed. During development and testing, she would sink and be salvaged a total of three times, drowning 13 in the process, including Horace Hunley himself. Even when it worked, the sub could best be described as painfully primitive. Attempts at an engine failed, resulting in it being hand-crank-powered, giving a maximum speed of barely walking pace. It was also nearly impossible to navigate while submerged, and, due to its small size and manpower needed to drive it, was incredibly cramped and ran out of breathable air quickly. Adding to the issues, the compass was slow, the water ballast tanks were not sealed, and it frequently veered off-course by itself or nose-dived to the riverbed. While the Hunley has the accomplishment of being the first submarine to sink an enemy vessel in active combat, the explosion of it's own torpedo was so close that the blast instantly killed the submarine's entire crew and sank the sub a final time giving the Hunley a death-to-kill ratio of 21:5 (unlike the submarine's crew, most of the target ship's crew managed to escape). Even worse, the sinking of the boat incensed Union forces, which began shelling the city at a far greater rate than before, making the Hunley's sole war effort a Pyrrhic Victory at best. Confederate General Beauregard stated that "it was more dangerous to those who use it than the enemy".
• The ill-fated Titan submersible by OceanGate became widely criticised when it imploded during an attempt to explore the wreck of the RMS Titanic (despite being famous for sinking, the Titanic herself was not an inherently bad design, and therefore not this trope). Despite assurances by the late CEO Stockton Rush - who also died onboard - that the sub was safe and that excessive safety regulations hampered innovation, many have pointed out the sub's jury-rigged construction which led to the tragedy. Titan couldn't have its latches opened from the inside, it had a cylindrical hull that wasn't as strong as a spherical one and didn't even have a way to communicate with the mothership outside of text messaging. Yet the biggest design flaw of Titan was its hull being made out of carbon fiber instead of titanium to save on costs; while carbon fiber has impressive tensile strength, it has notoriously bad compression strength and thus was very prone to cracking under stress. It should noted that while some have also ridiculed OceanGate's use of an off-the-shelf Logitech Xbox 360 controller^note (various news outlets described said controller as a "knockoff PlayStation controller"; the device was designed for Windows PCs in mind, using an Xbox 360 control scheme as per the XInput standard), this practice of using commodity game controllers is nothing new as various industries such as the military have made use of game interface devices due to their familiarity and low cost.

Other

• The Antarctic Snow Cruiser would have made for a truly awesome research vehicle were it not for the downright idiotic decision to equip it with smooth, treadless tires. In theory, this was intended to prevent them from becoming encrusted with snow. In practice, the tires spun freely, sank nearly a meter into the snow, and failed to grip the ice, making it virtually impossible for the Snow Cruiser to move more than a few meters in any given direction. The crew attempted to mitigate the issue by installing chains on the rear wheels, but this solution resulted in the Snow Cruiser only being able to move in reverse. The Snow Cruiser was eventually abandoned following the end of the United States Antarctic Service Expedition in 1941, and later sank underneath the Antarctic ice. As if to emphasize just how boneheaded the whole decision to use smooth tires was, the Snow Cruiser's Soviet counterpart, the Kharkovchanka, used tank treads instead of wheels, having been constructed on the same platform as the well-regarded T-54, and went on to have a long and successful career before finally being replaced by the more advanced Vityaz DT-30P in the 1980s.

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