Sail/Steam Powered Navy for USE?

pokermind wrote:The following list of Nautical terms from an article on sailing a canoe I wrote might be of use and interest.

Sailor talk for Landlubbers

Sailing like all other occupations developed its own technical jargon. The following is a short list of terms to help you sound like an old salt with twenty years before the mast. You might rent a copy of Treasure Island with Robert Newton as Long John Silver and practice the Arr, the squint, and the British pronunciation of the terms. Yea, I’m a little crazy too, after all I sail a canoe, arr.

Aft, is the sailor’s term for the back of a vessel.

Anchor, the sailor’s term for a heavy thing at the end of a rope cable, or chain dropped into the water to arrest the vessel’s movement. It is also used to describe the action of arresting the vessel’s movement.

A Vast, the sailor’s order to stop what one is doing, to cease and desist.

Beam, the sailor’s term for the width of a vessel.

Belay, is the sailor’s term for making fast a halyard, sheet, mooring rope, or Anchor rope. Can also be used to mean stop, IE "Belay that talk, mate."

Belaying pin, a turned wooden pin stuck vertically in a board to which halyards, sheets, mooring ropes, or anchor ropes are belayed.

Block, the sailor’s term for a pulley.

Boom, the sailor’s term for a piece of wood under a sail with one end anchored to the mast of the vessel.

Cleat, a cast metal or wooden horizontal bar with one or two legs that rope is made fast to.

Clew, the sailor’s term for the lower corner of a sail, note a square sail has two clews, while our sprit sail has only the one at the outside bottom corner of the sail.

Draft, the sailor’s term for the depth of a vessel below water.

Down hall, is a rope that lowers a sail, i.e. it only pulls the sail down while the Halyard pulls the sail up, and by releasing it may lower the sail.

Fore, the sailor’s term for the front of a vessel.

Gaff, is the term for a pole's end with a crotch for the mast, or an eye for a pin on the mast. It is also the name of a pole with a hook on one end to catch things in the water.

Gunwale, is the sailor’s term for the sides of the vessel, from the bad old days when the cannon’s were on the sides of a ship a gun wall.

Halyard, is the sailor’s term for a rope that raises a sail to its operating height. It must be free to lower the sail.

Lanyard, the sailor’s term for a rope with a loop in the end, in our rig there are two loops and the end of the lanyard is threaded through a hole in the mast and made fast with a stopping knot.

Larboard, is the sailor’s term for the left side of the vessel when facing foreword. Because it can be confused with Starboard most sailors use Port for left today.

Leach, the sailor’s term for the part of a sail against a mast often attached to the mast by small rings of rope called gaskets.

Lee, is the sailor’s term for the side of the vessel away from the wind.

Lee Board, is the sailor’s term for a board fixed to the gunwales of a vessel to resist the action of the wind driving a close halled ship to leeward. In my canoe it is tied to the center thwart and the end weighted with lead. The whole painted red.

Mast, is the sailor’s term for the pole that carries the sails and rigging, our canoe will have but one mast, the main mast.

Peak, the sailor’s term for the outside top corner of a sail attached to the mast.
Port, is the modern sailor’s term for left, or larboard mate.

Sheet, the sailor’s term for a rope or line attached to a sail to move it in operation, our spritsail has a clew sheet and a peak sheet, the ends of the same rope.

Sprit, is the sailor’s term for the pole running diagonally behind the sail between the lanyard of the mast and the peak of a spritsail.

Spritsail, is the sailor’s term for a sail with two pieces of wood holding out the outside ends of the sail, a boom on the lower clew and a sprit on the peak. The inside ends of the wood pieces are held by a rope lanyard in our rig, while larger examples would end in gaffs.

Starboard, is the sailor’s term for the right side of the vessel when facing forward.

Stays, are the sailor’s term for the ropes that hold the mast in place, our rig has two backstays and a forestay, a total of three stays.

Tack, is the sailor’s term for a course of diagonals that allow a vessel to sail into the direction of the wind.

Thwart is the name of a piece of wood across a canoe joining and separating the gunwales.

Windward, is the sailor’s term for the side of the vessel facing the wind. With our sprint sail rig it is usually the Port side while sailing.

Haven’t got enough, well a company called Lee Valley has reprinted the 1808 Young Officers Sheet Anchor, this book will teach you to tell your fore topgallant royal from the mizzen mate, Arr.



CPO Poker Mind SOB = Squid On Beach, and Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat First.

Mange, <Sail a tippy canoe, yes, the Chief is crazy.>

ChiefPete wrote:

pokermind wrote:The following list of Nautical terms from an article on sailing a canoe I wrote might be of use and interest.

Sailor talk for Landlubbers



Mange, <Sail a tippy canoe, yes, the Chief is crazy.>

Teaching landlubbers nautical terms is an exercise in futility. Unless you were raised around the ocean or were in the service USCG/USN and spent alot of time on board ship. Even alot of yachtsmen don't say them right, and that irritates the hell out of me. A few examples are

Coxswain pronounced cox'un
Boatswain bos'un
Topsail tops'l

You get the idea.
Why would you put a sail on a canoe without putting outriggers on it, that's down right foolish and extremely dangerous.

Mange I have a deal for you that involves shrimp and celery would you be intersted.

The Chief

runsforcelery wrote:

Relax wrote:

Mitchell, Esq. wrote:I just don't understand why people are so fixated on frigates.

Because navies have always had the term Frigate for the past several hundred years. The definition has changed over time, but it has always been used. FOREX frigates in the 18th/19th century would be what we called cruisers CA/CL in WWI and WWII. The age of sail rendition for modern term for frigate would be closer to the sloop of war though not quite as a modern frigate is a blue navy ship as well.

Now MWW has essentially changed the modern term for Frigate(Convoy escort, minesweeper, ASW fleet escort) into Destroyer from everything I can tell and keeps inventing new ways to cover his change in definition while denigrating the use of the term frigate because he sees modern frigates( & Honorverse Frigates) as a waste of money and his inner admiral rebels at wasting money buying such ships when destroyers costing a bit more are so much better. A lot of modern "destroyers" are really frigates if one goes by the definition of the US navy. You will note his continual use of the 70% cost of a destroyer theme throughout his posts. I don't disagree here, just that reality would dictate that navies would take the view that saving said 30% per ship is more important to achieving procurement funds than building too few ships for duty slots to fill.

Unfortunately said ships exist in REALITY due to a thing called $$$ of which MWW only gives a token wave of the hand acknowledgement.

No, the SLN will not build Frigates in the Honorverse. Frankly I am surprised they bother building DD's or Cl's. Same reason State Security didn't have such small ships either. Now, SDF's with large merchant fleet needing convoy escort on the other hand, I would fully expect to field frigates as used by the modern definition.

A "frigate" in the classic naval sense was a cruising vessel with a single armed deck that served "below the line." It performed primarily the functions of an early twentieth century cruiser, and occupied a middle ground between the battle fleet proper and the light units used for commerce protection (or destruction) and similar patrol-oriented missions. The term actually ceased to be completely accurate with the introduction of the "double-banked" frigates with armed spardecks (like the famous USS Constitution) and virtually every frigate built after that until the construction of HMS Warrior in the 1850s was "double-banked." Technically the ironclad British ship was simply the biggest sailing frigate (her steam was primarily for auxiliary power in combat) ever built, since she was indeed armed on a single deck. Actually, she was a battleship, designed and built (and at the time of her construction very much able) to destroy any foreign battleship in existence. In the pre-1900 American naval tradition, frigates were always heavy ships, fulfilling more of the battlecruiser or armored cruiser role and standing in for true battleships because there really were no American battleships. One reason we'd always built powerful, heavy frigates was because we knew we weren't going to be able to build a genuine battle fleet and needed what amounted to powerful heavy cruisers instead. (This tradition is one reason why the USN's use of the "frigate" terminology in the 20th century was so different from that of most of the other world's naval powers.)

By the end of the 19th century, the term "frigate" was falling out of use, replaced by function-determined type labels — like torpedo boat, torpedo boat-destroyer, and cruiser — which more precisely delineated the role the ship was to carry out. The term didn't reenter common usage until the British Royal Navy reintroduced it for a long-range oceanic escort falling between the corvette (another sailing era term which had been appropriated and somewhat misapplied) and the fleet destroyer. In British service, therefore, a frigate was a vessel smaller than a destroyer.

In American service, the World War II equivalent of the British frigate was the escort destroyer, and the term frigate was not used in naval service in the United States between about 1870 and 1950-55. The term reemerged in American service as a label for what were also known as "ocean escorts" or "task force" escorts — very large destroyers which had to be large in order to provide the combination of weapons fit, sensor capability, range and speed to cope with nuclear powered submarines and the increasingly dangerous air threat, and to keep station on aircraft carriers larger than any battleship ever built at high speed even in heavy weather. Some of the ships which fell into this category were known as frigates (or "destroyer leaders," which was the origin of the "DL” designation for the frigate); some were destroyers, some were missile destroyers, and some were as big as cruisers, etc.

The Norfolk built in 1951 was the first American "frigate" (also referred to as an ASW hunter/killer [CLK]), she displaced 5,600 tons, better than twice as much as a Fletcher-class destroyer because of the way in which the operational requirements for task force escorts had changed. She was also considered to be far too large and far too expensive; it would be impossible to build enough of her to provide the required coverage, and so she remained one-of-a-kind, followed by the smaller, less capable Mitscher class. Eventually, the pressures of mission creep forced the Navy (and Congress) to authorize the larger Farragut, Coontz, Leahy, and Belknap classes of conventionally-powered "frigates" and the Bainbridge and Truxton and the California and Virginia class nuclear powered "frigates." These were big ships, with tonnages closely approaching (or even exceeding) Norfolk's, and yet despite their size, they tended to be biased towards either antisubmarine warfare or anti-air warfare, not equally capable of both, because the Navy simply couldn't build equal capability for both on the hull sizes available.

It was not until 1975 that the United States Navy undertook a rationalization of its nomenclature to attempt to get ships of approximately the same tonnage and the same operating characteristics under the same labels. Most of the frigates at that time became either cruisers (CLG) or guided-missile destroyers (DDG), because the ships which the US had described as frigates were larger than destroyers. Most other navies had continued to use the British World War II designation, in which "frigates" were smaller than destroyers; what the United States was calling frigates at the time, those other navies were calling "cruisers," and the American change in nomenclature brought us more into line with the practice of those other navies. For that matter, the more recent Oliver Hazard Perry-class' designation as a frigate (and the only frigate class we still have in commission at all) is much more in keeping with the European practice. It's worth noting, by the way, that there are only about 40 Perrys still in service and that they require/have required substantial upgrades in their anti-air capabilities.

In the Honorverse, the term "frigate" applies to a specific tonnage range, which falls between the LAC and the destroyer. It is simply a label for a ship of a given hull size, although the hull size has led to a function-based concept of what a "frigate" is, just as the tonnage bracket for "destroyer" led to a function-based concept of what a "destroyer" was . . . in 1905 PD. In Manticoran practice, function-based labels have superseded the tonnage-based labels for the various types of warship. That is, a "destroyer" is what fulfills the functions of a 1905 destroyer in the current combat environment, regardless of the actual size of the ship under consideration.

My problem with the inexplicable fascination that the "frigate" seems to hold for certain people in the Honorverse has nothing to do with the term's historic implications, or with any penchant on my part for “inventing new ways to cover his change in definition while denigrating the use of the term frigate because he sees modern frigates( & Honorverse Frigates) as a waste of money and his inner admiral rebels at wasting money buying such ships." I haven't changed any definitions, at least from where I was at the beginning of the Honorverse books, and to be honest my use of the term "frigate" is much more consistent with the use of that term by the world in general since 1900 than the current American use of the term is. It may not be consistent with the 17th or 18th century descriptors, but then the 17th and 18th century descriptors weren't very consistent with the 16th descriptor from when the type first originated, either.

Frigates, described as falling into the tonnage brackets established for the frigate type as of 1905, do not make sense for any interstellar power to build, which is why the type had fallen out of favor and no one had built any for several decades.

One reason I've been pointing out the difference between the Honorverse interstellar model and the oceanic model is that providing large numbers of light warships to escort convoys is not going to be a high priority for any Honorverse navy. When the Manties sent escorts along in Silesia, it wasn't to protect the convoys against attack in hyper, where such attacks are virtually impossible to bring off. It was to provide a mobile, "sanitized" bubble of secure space for that convoy's members when they dropped back into normal-space within the territory of the star nation unable or unwilling to police its own space effectively against pirates. This isn't a situation in which hordes of corvettes and destroyer escorts are going to be useful for fighting off German U-boats on the way across the Atlantic. The ships doing the equivalent of "crossing the Atlantic" in the Honorverse are effectively immune from attack. It's when they reach the English Channel that they need protection against the Dunkirk-based pirates. And there certainly isn't any equivalent of the ability of a fairly weakly-armed surface ship to "force down" a U-boat, forcing it to submerge and burn up its battery endurance while simultaneously falling behind the convoy; it's much more a matter of fighting off E-boats or light cruisers. As a consequence, where commerce protection is concerned, it's far more vital to have a useful number of capable platforms than a vast plethora of incapable platforms.

It is not a matter of cruising range, it is not a matter of endurance, it is a matter of whether or not it makes sense to put an extremely light weapons fit into an extremely vulnerable hull when a better solution to the problem is available. The Oliver Hazard Perry-class was seen as the "low" end component of a "high/low" mix in which the Spruance-class was seen as the "high" end. The ships were built at that time because the United States Navy needed platforms and couldn't convince Congress to cough up the funds to build platforms with the capabilities that they really wanted and was able to come up with a "workaround" solution that met (far from perfectly) it's minimum requirements. The result was that the Perrys were good at killing submarines and capable of little more than self-defense when it came to killing aircraft. The USN had been forced to accept a policy of building specialized designs and operating task forces as integrated groups of specialists none of whom could have done the job in isolation by themselves. All of the Navy's procurement policies where naval escorts were concerned were focused around protecting the carriers rather than producing force projection ships that could operate independently of air cover and the support of their other specialized fellows in any sort of high threat environment.

Honorverse requirements for ships to fulfill the cruiser/presence role are not the same as 20th-21st century carrier battle group escort. They are far closer to the requirements of the 18th or 19th century. Unless you're prepared to send a battle squadron or so along to support them, those vessels have to be capable of looking after themselves a long way from home and fulfilling the classic frigate role, which is not the "frigate" role people are trying to build undersized vessels to fill.

The British Royal Navy in the 1930s needed a lot of cruisers to police its trade routes and the far-flung British Empire, and they found themselves caught in a trap of their own devising because of the tonnage limitations/labels they'd negotiated as part of the Washington Naval Disarmament Treaties. What they really needed were ships in about the same 6,000-ton range as the later American "frigates" and armed with 6 to 8 6" guns, but what everyone else was building as cruisers tended to be in the 10,000-ton range (or bigger, depending on how much they felt like cheating on the naval treaties) and armed with 8" guns because that was the "upper limit" of cruiser tonnages defined by the treaties and nobody else needed to produce as many platforms out of the treaty-limited total cruiser tonnages allotted to the treaty's signatories. But while the Brits would have preferred to build (and, in fact, did build) quite a few of those smaller 6"-gun cruisers, they never had any intention of building 1,200-ton destroyers to fulfill the traditional "frigate" role. Their destroyers were built primarily as screening and escort vessels for the battle fleet, because they didn't have the size and the endurance to independently deploy to distant stations; that was what cruisers were for. The Americans and the Japanese built substantially larger destroyers, which the British tended to denigrate during the interwar years as being far too large to fulfill a traditional destroyer's screening and escort function. Unfortunately, the Americans and the Japanese needed that extra tonnage because they were preparing to fight across Pacific Ocean distances, not Atlantic distances, and they needed the additional endurance and cruising radius. When the Brits designed their Battle-class destroyers for service in the Pacific, they found that they were going to need ships at least as large as the American Fletcher-class ships.

They built small, relatively low-endurance destroyers as long as those ships served the function they needed to serve. When they needed bigger and more capable ships, that's what they built. A nation like Germany can afford to build — and rely upon — "frigates" in the European sense of smaller, less-capable vessels because of the nature of their requirements, which are less stringent and certainly far less global than those of the United States Navy. The United States can afford to build those smaller "frigates" only as part of a "high/low" procurement strategy and only if it's going to regard its escorts as plug-in/plug-out specialized components of a force which relies upon dispersed platforms to provide all of its required functions.

Something the size of a 1905 Honorverse frigate could no longer provide the required capabilities to carry out either a viable long-range independent presence role or to survive in the screening role for a battle group or task force. It was simply too small, too fragile, and too restricted in firepower in terms of both numbers of weapons systems and depth of magazines. So, no major power was building them anymore; they were building destroyers, which had become the smallest (and therefore cheapest) viable platforms. People, I don't care whether you call them frigates or destroyers, and I don't care whether you're trying to cut costs or not. A 1905 destroyer was a "frigate" in the European sense of being a small, minimum capability platform.

Given the fact that the combat environment has gotten no way but uglier since 1905, and given the fact that a 1905 light cruiser is probably not especially survivable in 1922 in any sort of serious combat situation, the idea that anyone is going to go back and begin building Honorverse frigates strikes me as foolish, to say the very least. It's not a case of "the admiral in me rebelling at the thought of wasting money on such ships;" it's a case of the people making those budgetary decisions recognizing what the minimum capability platform is. They may choose to build destroyers instead of cruisers for roles in which the Manties would undoubtedly use cruisers (or at least Roland-class destroyers) in 1922 PD, but that's because those destroyers are, for all intents and purposes, 1922 PD "frigates." You simply can't get by with anything smaller, so it's not a question of "shall I build something even smaller and cheaper" than a destroyer but a question of "how many platforms can I build at the minimum possible cost, which is that of a destroyer?"

The LAC represents a way to acquire much of the same presence and security capability as a traditional frigate (Honorverse variety) for less financial cost, with more flexibility, more survivability through redundancy, and a lower manpower cost. Deployed from CLACs in the anti-missile role, they are also more capable — much more capable — of performing the antimissile screening mission, and within the constraints of that mission, all of the advantages they have over the frigate in terms of cost, survivability through redundancy, and economy of manpower are at least as valid in comparison to the destroyer. That's one reason why I've said — more than once — that there are those within the Royal Manticoran Navy who believe that even destroyers are obsolete given the current combat matrix. However, even the Royal Manticoran Navy is continuing to build destroyers (even if they are now the size of the Roland-class) because of fiscal and industrial pressures. They're building less capable, more vulnerable platforms than they would in a perfect world because they don't live in a perfect world. But no Manticoran admiral in his right mind would suggest going back and building something the size of Honor's old destroyer Hawkwing, because the naval force mix has moved on and evolved enormously in the last 20 years or so. That being the case, why are there people out there who are still insisting that the Honorverse frigate is still either (a) a viable weapon system, or (b) going to be acquired for purely fiscal reasons, irrespective of strategic or tactical considerations? Was anybody in 1914 still designing and building pre-dreadnought battleships? No. Was anybody in 1940 still designing and building 300-ton torpedoboats or 500-ton torpedoboat-destroyers? No. Was anybody in 1950 still building 16,000 ton fleet aircraft carriers like the Ranger? No. Is anybody in 2011 building 2,500-ton destroyers like the Fletcher? No. Is anybody ever likely to go back and decide to build those obsolete, undersized, less capable, non-survivable ship types again? No.

So what the heck is it that leads people to believe that Honorverse admirals and government budgetary decision-makers are going to be stupid enough to go back and do the equivalent?

Like I said at the beginning of the post Duckk crossposted from Baen’s Bar, it seems like there isn't a stake in the world big enough to put through the heart of this particular ludicrous contention.

Eric Flint wrote:
And . . . that’s it, as of now. There are a lot more volumes coming. The next volume of the 1632 series that will be appearing in print is Ring of Fire III, in July of this year. My story in that volume is directly connected to this novel and will lay some of the basis for its sequel. The discerning (that’s a polite way of saying fuss-budget) reader will have noticed and perhaps been disturbed by the fact that the Bavarian invasion of the Overpfalz vanished from this novel almost as soon as it was reported in Chapter 21.
That’s because if I’d included that episode in this book it would have loaded it down with a large and un-wieldy—and unresolved—sub-plot. So, instead, I will tell that story in Ring of Fire III.
I’m not sure yet the order in which I will write the next two novels in the series. The direct sequel to this book will pick up from the end of my story in Ring of Fire III and cover Mike Stearns’ handling of the as-signment that Gustav Adolf gave him in the last chapter of this novel—crush Maximilian of Bavaria. New developments involving mumble mumble will also require Mike to mumble mumble in the course of which he winds up mumble mumbling. The working title of that novel is 1636: Tum te Tum te Tum.
Or I might decide instead to finish a novel I began a while ago and set aside when I realized I was getting ahead of myself. The title of that novel is 1636: The Anaconda Project. That book will serve as a sequel to my short novel “The Wallenstein Gambit,” which was published in the first of the Ring of Fire anthologies, and will tell the story of how Wallenstein—working mostly through Morris Roth—begins the expansion of his new kingdom to the east, by encroaching on the Ruthenian territory under Polish-Lithuanian rule. It will also serve as a companion volume to this novel, by recounting some of the developments in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that were left offstage here. The attentive reader of this volume will recall that it was mentioned that the hussar Lukasz Opalinski’s older brother Krzysztof and the notorious up-time radical Red Sybolt were off somewhere in Ruthenia stirring up trouble for the Polish powers-that-be. That tale will be told in 1636: The Anaconda Project.
(If you’re wondering about the distinction, “attentive” readers are the readers who pay attention to the things an author wants them to notice. “Discerning” readers are the damn nuisances who insist on fussing over loose ends that the author thought he’d swept far enough under the rug to be out of sight.)
A number of other novels are in the works that deal with other story lines in the series. I will mention in particular:
Andrew Dennis and I have started working on 1635: A Parcel of Rogues. That novel will pick up the story of the group left behind in England after the escape from the Tower of London depicted in 1634: The Baltic War. The characters involved will include Julie Sims, Alex Mackay, Oliver Cromwell, Gayle Mason and Stephen Hamilton.
Chuck Gannon and I are writing 1635: The Papal Stakes. That novel is the direct sequel to 1635: The Can-non Law, which I co-authored with Andrew Dennis. It will focus on Harry Lefferts’ attempt to rescue Frank Stone and his wife Giovanna from Spanish captivity and lay some of the basis for the continuing tale of Sharon Nichols, Ruy Sanchez and the now-exiled Pope Urban VIII.
Walter Hunt and I are writing a novel set in North America. Since the working title of that novel has al-ready been announced publicly in Locus magazine, I suppose there’s no point in me trying to keep it buried. It’s 1636: Drums Along the Mohawk, which was supposed to have been a private joke. That will not be the title under which it actually gets published.
Yes, the Iroquois will figure in the story. Beyond that, I will say nothing.
David Carrico and I are working on a novel titled 1636: Symphony for the Devil. This is a mystery novel which takes place in Magdeburg simultaneously with many of the events depicted in 1636: The Saxon Upris-ing.
Iver Cooper is putting together an anthology of his own writing, similar in format to Virginia DeMarce’s 1635: The Tangled Web. These interwoven stories focus mostly on the New World, especially the Japanese decision to colonize the west coast of North America.
Other planned volumes include:
With Mercedes Lackey, a comic novel (sub-titled Stoned Souls) that continues the adventures of Tom Stone and others.
With Gorg Huff and Paula Goodlett, a romantic comedy sub-titled The Viennese Waltz, which will run par-allel to one of my later main line novels and serve also as a sequel to a number of the stories they’ve written about the Barbie Consortium in various issues of the Gazette.
(If you’re wondering why I’m only providing sub-titles, it’s because I still don’t know exactly which year they’ll fall under. Either 1635 or 1636, depending on this and that and the other.)
And there it stands. For the moment.

robert132 wrote:Hi Chief,
Looking back at your original post and having read through several of the 1632 series novels I'd like to take a look at what Simpson could build given the general state of industry and technology he has available.

Personally I think your first choice of a "Kearsarge" type steam powered sloop of war might be the ticket to get some long legged North Sea / North Atlantic ocean going warships into service soonest.

The walking beam steam engines used in the "Baltic War" timberclads aren't really all that far removed in concept from the engines necessary for a steam-screw ship though a triple expansion engine might just be asking for a bit too much at this point. While she couldn't carry enough coal or other fuel to run the engine 24/7, she's a hybred powered by sail for normal cruising with steam available as auxiliary power and to free her from the restrictions of the wind during combat.

While the "Kearsarge" wouldn't carry a large number of guns, the large caliber of the few she can ship would make her an overmatch for the best warships or converted merchantmen which still make up the bulk of the other European navies of the time. It will be years, perhaps a decade or more before ships along the lines of Wabash / Merrimack (with better engines I hope,) "frigates" far larger and much much better armed than "Old Ironsides" would be needed.

Indeed, once the production of quality iron or even steel in large quantities is perfected I could see the USE opting to jump directly to something resembling "HMS Warrior" and skip right past "Wabash."

Until the size of the ship and efficiency of the steam engines make it possible to ship sufficient fuel for weeks at sea under steam, Simpson will have to content himself with his cruisers spending most of their time under sail.

pokermind wrote:
Hi

Word on the Bar is that David is going for side wheelers, see Snerkers on side wheelers. Odd he's going triple expansion engine that has a raising screw like the CSS Alabama that the USS Kersange sunk in Safehold.

poker.