MASSIVE SPOILER about next book hardware

AClone wrote:Wow. I evoked an RFC response. [G]

...and considering the size of their freight wagons, I had a sneaking suspicion.

But then my next question is, how does a riverboat nearly the length of a sea going war galleon get transported from Charis to the mainland? Tow? Seems to me that I recall some early ironclads were swamped on the open ocean during storms...

This thing's got a lot more freeboard (11.5 feet) [height between the waterline and the deck] than early US ironclads. So that'll help a lot.

Beyond that if you needed to you could probably unmount some of it's guns and either stow them as ballast (or replace them with ballast and ship them separately). That would improve stability by moving the weight lower in the hull.

Then pick a reasonable time of year, have good pumps, and it shouldn't be too bad.

It's no HMS Warrior (in terms of seaworthiness) but it's not USS Montior with just a few inches of freeboard.

And with 1,900 mile range with max bunkerage I don't think you'd need to tow it across. (I can't recall how far it is from Charis to Siddemark, so you might need to sent a couple coaliers to refill it's bunkers; but I'm sure you could find a port or sheltered cove to coal at. Going under power should be safer than under tow, but we'll see)

Jonathan_S wrote:

AClone wrote:Wow. I evoked an RFC response. [G]

...and considering the size of their freight wagons, I had a sneaking suspicion.

But then my next question is, how does a riverboat nearly the length of a sea going war galleon get transported from Charis to the mainland? Tow? Seems to me that I recall some early ironclads were swamped on the open ocean during storms...

This thing's got a lot more freeboard (11.5 feet) [height between the waterline and the deck] than early US ironclads. So that'll help a lot.

Beyond that if you needed to you could probably unmount some of it's guns and either stow them as ballast (or replace them with ballast and ship them separately). That would improve stability by moving the weight lower in the hull.

Then pick a reasonable time of year, have good pumps, and it shouldn't be too bad.

It's no HMS Warrior (in terms of seaworthiness) but it's not USS Montior with just a few inches of freeboard.

And with 1,900 mile range with max bunkerage I don't think you'd need to tow it across. (I can't recall how far it is from Charis to Siddemark, so you might need to sent a couple coaliers to refill it's bunkers; but I'm sure you could find a port or sheltered cove to coal at. Going under power should be safer than under tow, but we'll see)

Guys, I'm not sure where the idea that even all monitors (with freeboards lower than 14 inches were deathtraps in bad weather comes from. IIRC, the only ACW monitor that foundered due to sea conditions was the Monitor herself, and there were any number of early ironclad warships with extremely limited freeboard which were considered "bad seaboats" but were not considered inherently unsafe at sea. At least one of the ACW monitor designs (I'll try to look up the name for a later reply) survived a Force 10 off Cape Hatteras with over four feet of water over her weather decks. As long as deck openings are sealed and intakes and exhausts for things like fire rooms and ventillators are raised high enough to be above the water, you can submerge a steam powered ship and she'll still be just fine. Uncomfortable, scary as hell, and not something anyone in his right mind would enjoy experiencing, but perfectly survivable.

I know that there has been some discussion on the board about the nature of the land war that appears to be heading to Siddermark.
At the level of technology of the Army of God, even if they manage to replicate Charisian technological innovations relatively rapidly, not a all a sure thing IMHO, they still labor under a severe knowledge gap in logistics and maneuver.
One the reasons that Napoleon so consistently out generaled his opposition was his mastery of the ability to split his forces and direct their route marches in such a way that they usually were able to concentrate more effectively than his opponents AND lessen the burden of supply for detached units by spreading out their impact on the country side they were marching through. A large foot powered army is very difficult to supply in the field, where "foraging" was the typical method of resupply.
Since the Charisian forces will have a number of leaders who will know where every significant enemy formation is in their area of operation (SNARCS), and many of those leaders will have had the opportunity to study Earth's military history, they should have a much better chance of bringing those opposing forces to battle in places and times of their choosing.
They should also by now have started developing more advanced methods of centralized command and control organizations, general staffs, division of areas of responsibility that are going to be unavaiable to the AoG without considerable trial and error.
There could be whole bunch of military geniuses in the Charisian armed forces.

runsforcelery wrote:
Guys, I'm not sure where the idea that even all monitors (with freeboards lower than 14 inches were deathtraps in bad weather comes from. IIRC, the only ACW monitor that foundered due to sea conditions was the Monitor herself, and there were any number of early ironclad warships with extremely limited freeboard which were considered "bad seaboats" but were not considered inherently unsafe at sea. At least one of the ACW monitor designs (I'll try to look up the name for a later reply) survived a Force 10 off Cape Hatteras with over four feet of water over her weather decks. As long as deck openings are sealed and intakes and exhausts for things like fire rooms and ventillators are raised high enough to be above the water, you can submerge a steam powered ship and she'll still be just fine. Uncomfortable, scary as hell, and not something anyone in his right mind would enjoy experiencing, but perfectly survivable.

Thanks for the clarification, RFC. Presumably Charisian ironclads would be better handled than Dohlaran galleys crossing the Cauldron.

And since you've brought up Civil War-era submarines... [G]

AClone wrote:

runsforcelery wrote:
Guys, I'm not sure where the idea that even all monitors (with freeboards lower than 14 inches were deathtraps in bad weather comes from. IIRC, the only ACW monitor that foundered due to sea conditions was the Monitor herself, and there were any number of early ironclad warships with extremely limited freeboard which were considered "bad seaboats" but were not considered inherently unsafe at sea. At least one of the ACW monitor designs (I'll try to look up the name for a later reply) survived a Force 10 off Cape Hatteras with over four feet of water over her weather decks. As long as deck openings are sealed and intakes and exhausts for things like fire rooms and ventillators are raised high enough to be above the water, you can submerge a steam powered ship and she'll still be just fine. Uncomfortable, scary as hell, and not something anyone in his right mind would enjoy experiencing, but perfectly survivable.

Thanks for the clarification, RFC. Presumably Charisian ironclads would be better handled than Dohlaran galleys crossing the Cauldron.

And since you've brought up Civil War-era submarines... [G]

Okay, said I'd check, and it turns out I was wrong: two monitors were lost in bad weather during the ACW: Monitor herself (987 tons displacement, with air intake pipes and smoke pipe only about 4-1/2 feet tall, not enouogh height above deck to function properly in heavy seas) and Weehawken, a Passaic class ship (1,900 tons displacement; these were the second class of monitors, with twice the tonnage, a radically different underwater hull form, taller ventilators, and a much taller smoke pipe), which had previously demonstrated her ability to ride out heavy weather remarkably well. It should be pointed out, however, that she sank at anchor in heavy weather off Morris Island, Charleston, SC, primarily because water entered the hull through an improperly secured hawse pipe and an open hatch. Apparently, she'd just taken on ammo forward, which had increased her displacement more than anticipated, and that submerged hull openings which certainly would have been kept closed up at sea. There's no doubt that monitors, with their low freeboard, were more vulnerable to heavy weather than ships with greater freeboard, but it was Lehigh (also a Passaic-class ship), which rode out the Force 10 with her decks 4.5 feet underwater. Onondaga (2,551 tons displacement) crossed the Atlantic when she was sold to France, Monadnock (3,400 tons displacement) passed the Straits of Magellan under her own power when she traveled from the East Coast all thr way to San Francisco; and Miantonomah (also 3,400 tons displacement) crossed the Atlantic twice in a 17,800-mile voyage, only 1,000 miles of which was made under tow (and that was to save fuel, not because of any conditions of weatherliness).

The original Monitor had a lot of design flaws (not surprisingly in the very first unit of a totally new class of warship), including the "raft" hull form whose overhang made her inherently less seaworthy than she would otherwise have been and the fact that her pumps used leather belts to provide power, which had . . . unfortunate consequences when she started flooding and the belts in question got wet. I promise that the Charisians won't make those particular design errors. And I should also point out that these are casemate, broadside ironclads, not monitors, and that there is no reason why they should be any inherently less seaworthy than any other vessels of their displacement and tonnage . . . plus they have not one but two reliable power plants. I point this out because a ship under power, properly handled, can survive almost any weather conditions you want to name at sea unless something drastic intervenes. For example, the DDs Halsey lost in the Great Typhoon in 1944 were all very short on fuel because of his decision not to rebunker before the weather closed in. Lack of fuel led to loss of stability as the ships' designed displacement and weight distribution changed, and that loss of stability was apparently the immediate cause of loss in the cases of all of the DDs lost. The same thing could obviously happen to any vessel . . . just as even the Titanic could rip her hull open on a spur of ice and go down in 1912.

Freeboard has nothing to do with if a ship sinks or not in heavy seas. Well it does depending on how much floatation said ship has, IE water depth it can hold on its deck.

Its weather sealing combined with its dynamic stability has everything to do with sinking in heavy seas or not. Where its center of gravity is in very simplistic terms combined with weather sealing.

If your ship is 90 degrees to oncoming cresting waves you are hosed no matter how high your free board is. It should be noted that a higher freeboard = a larger sail meaning weathercocking of said ship and riding out said storm is easier to do. Of course get a storm blowing one way and the waves rolling the other which is not uncommon and then a high freeboard is a gigantic hinderance and undesirable.

A properly designed ship can roll well over 45 degrees degrees and be perfectly fine. Now the occupants might not think so...

Freeboard has everything to do with being able to battle each other in rough seas effectively. Freeboard has everything to do with the usability of said ship and its personnel in rough seas. Nobody is doing anything above class 7 except surviving.

The ultimate of of this is a kayak. Impossible to sink in bad weather. Not exactly very user friendly in bad weather though... How long can you hold your breath? I have been pushed under for over 15s before... It felt FAR FAR longer. I guesstimate about 15s and who knows how many times I rolled. Never been so scared in my life before. Who knows how high the waves were. All I know was that it was gigantic white caps and cresting waves in all directions. I'd say 25foot waves easy. Its hard to tell in a kayak, as anything over 3 feet is well above your head add in cross chop crests and well... Needless to say I went where the wind was blowing. Thankfully it blew me to the head of Knight Inlet with the wind coming out of the Queen Charlotte straight off the Pacific Ocean. 1st "beach" in reach on backside of an island away from the thundering surf and kissed terra firma.

Great account relax...

I am fairly sure the Ironclads will make it too the Haven it is what they will do after that that interests me

Relax wrote:Freeboard has nothing to do with if a ship sinks or not in heavy seas. Well it does depending on how much floatation said ship has, IE water depth it can hold on its deck.

Its weather sealing combined with its dynamic stability has everything to do with sinking in heavy seas or not. Where its center of gravity is in very simplistic terms combined with weather sealing.

If your ship is 90 degrees to oncoming cresting waves you are hosed no matter how high your free board is. It should be noted that a higher freeboard = a larger sail meaning weathercocking of said ship and riding out said storm is easier to do. Of course get a storm blowing one way and the waves rolling the other which is not uncommon and then a high freeboard is a gigantic hinderance and undesirable.

A properly designed ship can roll well over 45 degrees degrees and be perfectly fine. Now the occupants might not think so...

Freeboard has everything to do with being able to battle each other in rough seas effectively. Freeboard has everything to do with the usability of said ship and its personnel in rough seas. Nobody is doing anything above class 7 except surviving.

The ultimate of of this is a kayak. Impossible to sink in bad weather. Not exactly very user friendly in bad weather though... How long can you hold your breath? I have been pushed under for over 15s before... It felt FAR FAR longer. I guesstimate about 15s and who knows how many times I rolled. Never been so scared in my life before. Who knows how high the waves were. All I know was that it was gigantic white caps and cresting waves in all directions. I'd say 25foot waves easy. Its hard to tell in a kayak, as anything over 3 feet is well above your head add in cross chop crests and well... Needless to say I went where the wind was blowing. Thankfully it blew me to the head of Knight Inlet with the wind coming out of the Queen Charlotte straight off the Pacific Ocean. 1st "beach" in reach on backside of an island away from the thundering surf and kissed terra firma.

I agree with everything you've said except to point out that freeboard has a bearing on how much angle of heel you can sustain. Not necessarily because of righting angles and motion, but because a low freeboard vessel has less height margin to keep openings which can't be sealed (such as engine room air intakes and exhausts) out of the water. I can think of several ships which went down because their angle of heel became so great that water poured in through openings which would normally have been well above their weather deck, and in almost every case, they were low freeboard designs. Dynamic stability and metacentric height are critical, but so is keeping the stacks out of the water! [G]

And then, of course, there's the unfortunate case of Cowper Coles, whose demise neatly demonstrates both your points about stability and mine about the relationship between freeboard, deck openings, and unhappy ends.

I REALLY wanted to post this in a separate thread, but as much of the discussion I seek would be centered around the information restricted to this thread, I'm going to hijack-and revive it.

Now, Shell fire is anathema to the wooden hulled high sea fleet Charis employs at this date and they know it.

RFC has shown us what they will build to control the inland waterways in the upcoming battles in Siddarmark will look like.

What I would like was to 'convene a design board' tasked with designing the next class of high seas 'battleship'. The board should look at successful historical precedents and, using the technology shown in this thread, design a class that will secure the Charisian control of the seaways in the face of shellfire.

Things to consider:
Should she be of a pure steam design with the inherent logistical constrains or is a hybrid steam/sail design more suited to the needs of Charis?
Should we go with a turreted design or with broadside batteries? perhaps a sponson design?
Armour: Tapered to protect virtually the full hull against exploding shells or an 'all-or-nothing' approach with heavy armour protecting the vitals (magazines, boiler and engines, steering, main batteries).
Construction: wooden hulled covered with armour, iron hulled, wood and steel armour or a pure steel construction (considering of cause availability of construction materials and the total unfamiliarity any Carisian would have with the latter options).

The design should of cause be kept within the proscriptions.

I will start the ball rolling with a conservative design: An Armoured Frigate of a similar design to HMS Warrior with inputs from later hybrid ships.

The biggest obstacle in the design will be Warriors all iron hull. Nobody on Safehold has tried building a ship with iron - even the basics of the technique, riveting the plates together, is virtually unheard of. Howsmyhn's works can create the plates and the frames and his workers can learn and teach the riveting techniques, what we are left with is the need for a shipwright to design her hull.

Warrior was huge - twice the length of any Carisian ship to date and with a displacement around 9.000 tonnes. Her size was largely determined by her gun deck. The 17 68LBs guns needed 15 feet of clearance and thus her gun deck was about 270 feet - 100 feet longer than the entire Royal Charis (Royal Charis carries 15 long 30LBs in her broadside) I'll make a WAG and cut my designed gun deck down to 200 feet and arm her with 30 (15 in a broadside) of the 6" breach loaders RFC has mentioned - alternatively, with 20 57LBs long guns (mentioned for the first two decker - HMS Thunderer) and 6 30 LBs long guns. she will carry 2 chase guns unprotected on the forecastle.

Back to her dimensions: Shortening the gun deck and the adjustments to her beam this requires will shrink her to 300 feet with a beam of 55 feet and a displacement of 7000 tonnes.

I will equip her with the most efficient sail plan, probably she will appear as a 4 masted barque with around 35000 sq. feet of sail.

For her steam propulsion, she will have the same double expansion engines as the river ironclad one fore and aft of the mainmast with watertight bulkheads between. Each engine will be fed by 4 Delthak Works watertube boilers placed in front and behind the engines (4 boilers for each engine). Should accident or battle damage knock one of the engine rooms out, the other can still drive her twin propellers. She will have two funnels, one before the mainmast, one aft.

Armour: By using the same armour as for the river gun boat, we will give her 3" on a citadel covering her entire gun deck and stretching till 2 feet below the waterline. This will serve as protection for her boiler and engine rooms. The armour should be backed by 10" of wood to prevent shock damage from breaking the bolts holding the armour onto the hull.
Her forecastle will be unarmoured, an 1" armoured bulkhead will protect the gun deck from raking fire. Coal bunkers will be in front of this armoured bulkhead and behind the bulkhead protecting the aft boiler room.
Her steering will be protected with a separate 3" armour belt.

Crew: Her barque rigging will reduce the manpower required for sail handling, even without any mechanisation her sails should be managed by no more than 100 men, half of which should be trained. Ideally her sails are furled prior to any engagement, turning her sail handlers into gunners.
On the other hand, her engines require quite a lot of 'black gang' - stokers and machinists. From the numbers mentioned for the River Ironclads I think the boilers and engines require something close to 80 man each, perhaps as many as 100.
Her armament in an engagement will take somewhere around 10 man per piece in the engaged side, with 5-6 standing ready by the unengaged pieces. Add a good sized marine detachment, damage control, ships boys, petty officers and officers and her full complement will be around 500.
Warrior carried 705 officers and men with a square rig. I might need to assign more sail handlers to cope with the sail handling required by a warship, as the number used were for a commercial barque.


Why did I choose such a relatively limited design? The primary reasons were to come up with a class that could operate independent of coaling stations and still retain the mobility independent of the wind steam provides. Another consideration was to present a vessel where only increments of innovation has been incorporated. Are these good arguments? Maybe not, and if you think so, please criticize or even better, present your competing design!

Yeah, I figured it out, RFC. Your hint was right there in plain sight. "There are only a limited number while they work on something else" Duh. I should have seen it before.

The canals are nothing more than a red herring. Cayleb and Merlin realized their error, and Howsmyn started building...steam powered helicopter gunships!

Oh, and when I look back, it's so obvious! [G]