How effective were ironclads during the US Civil War?
Did they have any real impact on naval superiority between the two warring belligerents?
How effective were ironclads during the US Civil War?
Cooper Moore
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Caleb Hughes
Pretty effective, but it was the riverine ironclads that had the most impact as they were more or less only threatened by mines and large installation guns.
Aiden Green
They were temperamental weapons but they were quite effective against non-ironclad ships and their only real weakness was a complete inability to actually really hurt each other without using their entire ammo store. They did however have massive morale potential, like the battleships of later naval conflicts, they represented the cutting edge of technology and were damn intimidating things.
The simple fact is cannons couldn't do shit against their hulls without large calibres or firing dozens of times. This meant that even if they weren't effective in the grand scheme of things, they were something that once you placed in an area you could be relatively certain you weren't going to have naval issues.
Ayden Sanchez
nothing a good submarine couldnt stop
Levi Barnes
Why did the redneck hick confederacy have such good tactics and technology?
Oliver Thompson
You know what happened to that boat right?
Jonathan Miller
You do realize the what the US military is always been made up of right?
Jaxson Price
Yeah but that was because of an explosion, the thing still worked relatively well
William Diaz
The CSA was going to use them to break the USA's blockade, but that was quickly countered as the USA came out with their own ironclads. From that point on, both sides could engage with ironclads but it wouldn't really result in a winner. It did practically end the age of sail and wood ships.
Gabriel Wilson
the south wasn't run by rednecks or hicks, those took over after the entire educated class died fighting for the cause
Jonathan Davis
Since the naval battles for the most part were in protected waters, they had a huge impact.
Though some would argue that the CSS Alabama had the biggest impact for the confederate navy.
But hell, we still call a type of ship a "monitor" based off the first Union ironclad.
Alexander Allen
James Bailey
Civil war tech thread?
Chase Lopez
They didn't? They didn't build the Merrimack, it was captured after burning to the waterline and rebuild, crudely, as an ironclad, but nowhere in the south could have produced the machinery (searing gear and engines) that powered it. They did manage to produce a good compromise design given the material available.
The Moniter was even more hilariously badly designed however. The turret controls were not in the turret, and it was remarkably hard to reverse the direction or stop it, and the hatch to pass ammunition up to the turret only was accessible in one turret position.
As a result, they simply left it slowly rotating and fired when it was more or less lined up with the target. Both vessels made vague attempts to ram, but with turning radius measured in literal miles the collisions that occurred seemed to be purely accidental. The greatest enemy on either ship was bad design choices. The armor could stop hostile explosive shells and round shot, but they suffered several heat casualties, and the Virginia/ Merrimack's captain was shot in the thigh with a rifle.
Because, and I'm not kidding, he'd gotten so angry at a shore battery for shooting at his ship when they were evacuating men from a captured ship that he got his own rifle, stood in the open, and fired at the battery until a sharpshooter hit him.
Nolan Price
It must have been something else to go up in a balloon back then.
Untouched skies and beautiful sights.
Parker Brown
Some of these ironclad designs look so cool. I really like the side wheel ones, even if that would present a very big target.
Isaiah Cruz
>Hey, boys, we've got ourselves a flyin' Yankee! Ready, aim,...fire!
>[Distant Bostonian yelling]
Elijah Scott
>but they suffered several heat casualties
Goddamn must have been like a sauna inside those things.
Southern temps and humidity combined with the boilers radiant heat... Plus all the thick smoke from the guns probably didn't help.
Nathan Baker
>big target
So what? These things were so tanked-up hardly anything could hurt them during the civil war
Ryan Robinson
It truly was a steampunk era.
Christian Rodriguez
Were there any armoured trains in the ACW?
I’m talking proper weapon equipped ironclad monstrosities
Asher Murphy
The plating on the wheels may not be that thick and the upper portion is almost vertical. Would it really stop a shell from penetrating and destroying one of the wheels?
It must be horrifying to see something steaming towards you and nothing you shoot at it will make it slow or stop. I wonder if there any any ideas for ground warfare that would be like tanks. I've never really looked into it.
Isaiah Cox
Is this a real design or something some hobbyist cooked up for the lulz
Christopher Sanchez
Real design, but not a very good one. She fought in some form but wasn't totally completed to what her designers wanted. Which was to put too much armor onto her.
en.wikipedia.org
Jason Perry
>I wonder if there any any ideas for ground warfare that would be like tanks.
I'm sure they had rough ideas, but anything ground based and slow would have been eaten alive by artillery.
In the end it would have just been a waste of precious resources for both sides.
Luis Morales
>that slow degeneration into trench warfare
It was like ww1 in slow motion
Matthew Rogers
>It must be horrifying to see something steaming towards you and nothing you shoot at it will make it slow or stop.
Imagine how the Germans felt seeing the first tank
Aaron Cooper
“the eternal Anglo strikes again”
Jonathan Collins
I think it would be a similar terror, but at least the WW1 tanks had pretty thin armor that could be penetrated by artillery. So once the Germans rallied from that initial fear, they found ways to approach the problem.
I'm not sure anything on land or sea at the time could penetrate the CSS Virginia when she first appeared.
Ryan Thomas
They called it 'panzerschrek' IIRC. 'Tank-funk.' The mere appearance of them demoralized the shit out of people.
Kevin Hughes
Friendly reminder iron doesn’t float and all these ironclads are propaganda fakes
Stay bluepilled
Brody Moore
user...
Joseph Green
Those crazy fuckers will all sorts of lengths to save pregnant Anne Frank
Ryan Cook
Adam Reed
*suffocates*
Jace Foster
That thing LITERALLY sucked dicks
Frogs made up for it with pic related
Eli White
It was born out of desperation they had to innovate or it was game over and they knew it. There's even some rumors that the Confederacy was doing research into chemical weapons 70 years before WW1.
Cameron Lewis
It was good being mobile artillery
Levi Powell
>this kills the rebel assault
Luke Allen
Saint-Chamond a shit, Mark series forever.
Eh, they weren't unique there. A schoolteacher from New York proposed using chlorine shells in the Civil War, and even before that the Brits considered cyanide munitions for the Crimean War.
Brayden Sanchez
Thank goodness nobody listened to the guy
It was. As a southern sympathizer, the yanks had every advantage in the book especially in the navy. The sub was just something pretty clever to get some ships out of action. Interestingly enough, people figured out why it went down after it hit the housitanic...hope I spelled that right, the blast was detonated too close and killed the crew nearly instantaneously.
Keked
This op, however any detonation charge big enough under them can still kill them.
Julian Perez
Bullets don't go in straight lines forever, you know.
Camden White
Powered ventilation systems significantly improved the endurance and reliability of ironclads by allowing stokers and oilers to work longer and harder. Temperatures in the engine room of some ironclads, before blowers were developed, could exceed 200 degrees Fahrenheit.
You could literally bake a cake in there.
Yes, a few of them. The biggest was basically a baggage car retrofitted with iron armor backed by oak and armed with a 24 pounder howitzer. I don't know much else about them.
Ironclads started an insane thirty years in naval tradition because for once defense outpaced attack. Iron armor could provide near total protection from the waterline to the top of the freeboard, and the results were weird.
The Battle of Lissa* didn't help, as it cemented the introduction of a weapon that -with no question- caused more friendly-fire damage then it did to the enemy: The 19th century ram.
Ramming something into the vulnerable, unarmored space under the waterline was, theoretically, a quick kill. Even non-ironclad ships could kill an ironclad this way in theory.
In practice, far more navigational accidents with fleets in tight formation resulted in friendly rams fucking up friendly ships.
*If you've never read about this, go ahead and do so. Austrian Empire vs Italians and one of the most lop-sided victories until Taffy 3 had tin can destroyers kick the shit out of a battle line that featured turrets that weighed more then their whole ships.
Blake Davis
Lissa was incorrectly seen as a victory brought by technology, rather than by enemy incompetence.
Ironically the ram sank more ships and killed more people during peacetime than war.
That said, the idea behind the ram wasn't completely dumb. In the span of time between armor plating and centralized gunfire direction, armor was better than the guns which were supposed to defeat it.
Sebastian Powell
That's why you fire more than one. the IV Corp of the Army of the Potomac alone was around 37,000 men.
Lucas Martin
Doesn't matter how much men fire if all the projectiles fall down before getting even remotely close to the target.
Brayden Ramirez
memeboats
not half as effective as british and french stationary designs used 10 years earlier in the black sea
Juan Morgan
>this was never used against a rebel assault
>this was actually only ever used during the civil war on northern civilians rioting against the draft and forced labor
Grayson Scott
>would-be rebel assault
if they run, they're rebels
if they stay still, they're well-trained rebels
Cameron Ward
its just hilarious how the north's wunderweapon was actually only used to kill northern civilians
Jason Powell
That's tank terror dude man
Justin Reed
Best thread on Jow Forums right now.
I remember learning about the monitor and merrimack in 5th grade history class and i loved the idea so much i made copies of them out of legos.
Adam Anderson
To be honest, one tank did manage to single-handedly wipe out a whole company. When they worked like they were supposed to, they were a terror to deal with.
Chase Baker
I just watched a documentary about the late war clandestine attenpts of the CSA to demoralize the northern morale. It was all comically silent film, mustache twirlingly dastardly. The only things that worked somewhat well were sending some old boys to shoot up a town in faggot Vermont in order to steal a bunch of money and the Sultana job
Jackson Lopez
How would these American Civil War gas shells work?
Jeremiah Price
(Samefag) I found the patent for a gas mask in the 1840s.
patents.google.com
Eli Cooper
This threads reminds me I haven't played a good acw game since civil war generals 2
Hudson Brooks
>CSA proceeds to build the Virginia
>doesn't even bother to suppress the news
>it reaches the newspaper
>Union catches wind of it
>panic builds the Monitor - fast and hauls its ass to the blockaded harbor
>shows up just in time for the battle
What a story.
Jose Smith
That's a beautiful ship
Jason Barnes
According to the wiki, basically the same as any other gas shell. 10" shell filled with a few quarts of liquid chlorine, not sure if he thought to use a bursting charge.