WI: Earlier Ironclads

tallwingedgoat · Sep 22, 2011

I'm aware of the history of ironclad development, as a reaction from Paixhans guns etc. But what if the ironclad precedes shell gun design. Suppose you take the hull of the CSS Virginia back to Napoleonic times, remove the steam engine and replace it with sail/horse powered paddles, change the guns to the most powerful available in that age. How would traditional navies deal with it?

The obvious flaw with this non steam ironclad would be mobility. It can't move very quickly with all the extra weight. OTOH it would be a formidable harbor defense ship. It would effectively be a slow moving coastal fort. Even a dozen ships of the line may not be able to capture a harbor defended by a single ironclad. At best they could hope to take out the sails and slow it down. The advantage of the ironclad would be similar to that between a ship of the line and frigates. The latter can out run anything it can't fight, but it can't control the battle space.

Such an armored ship may not be suited for large navies with world wide deployment requirements. But small navies should be able to deny access to their ports with only a handful of such ironclads.

NHBL · Sep 22, 2011

Armor problems...

One problem with earlier ironclads is the quality of the iron. I'm not sure if earlier iron would resist cannon shot--or simply shatter.

David S Poepoe · Sep 22, 2011

tallwingedgoat said:
I'm aware of the history of ironclad development, as a reaction from Paixhans guns etc. But what if the ironclad precedes shell gun design. Suppose you take the hull of the CSS Virginia back to Napoleonic times, remove the steam engine and replace it with sail/horse powered paddles, change the guns to the most powerful available in that age. How would traditional navies deal with it?

The obvious flaw with this non steam ironclad would be mobility. It can't move very quickly with all the extra weight. OTOH it would be a formidable harbor defense ship. It would effectively be a slow moving coastal fort. Even a dozen ships of the line may not be able to capture a harbor defended by a single ironclad. At best they could hope to take out the sails and slow it down. The advantage of the ironclad would be similar to that between a ship of the line and frigates. The latter can out run anything it can't fight, but it can't control the battle space.

Such an armored ship may not be suited for large navies with world wide deployment requirements. But small navies should be able to deny access to their ports with only a handful of such ironclads.

You are talking about floating batteries which many small navies did build. You are also to a degree talking about Fulton's Demologos which may be considered, in jest, a woodclad. A few navies, the Dutch come to mind, converted their ships of the line to floating batteries.

Historically, thin iron armour was secured to thick oak walls.

Anaxagoras · Sep 22, 2011

NHBL said:
One problem with earlier ironclads is the quality of the iron. I'm not sure if earlier iron would resist cannon shot--or simply shatter.

Agreed. Ironclads pretty much came about as soon as the technology which made them possible became available. For earlier ironclads, you need a POD which speeds up technological progress. And that introduces so many butterflies into the TL as to make the question the least interesting thing around.

tallwingedgoat · Sep 23, 2011

NHBL said:
One problem with earlier ironclads is the quality of the iron. I'm not sure if earlier iron would resist cannon shot--or simply shatter.

Why not, wrought iron by the puddling process was available. Besides ironclad armor was mounted on a thick wood backing.

tallwingedgoat · Sep 23, 2011

David S Poepoe said:
You are talking about floating batteries which many small navies did build. You are also to a degree talking about Fulton's Demologos which may be considered, in jest, a woodclad. A few navies, the Dutch come to mind, converted their ships of the line to floating batteries.

Historically, thin iron armour was secured to thick oak walls.

That's very interesting. I've never heard of Deomologos. Did the Dutch floating batteries ever see action? I'm curious how they would actually perform against ships of the line.

It's what we would call asymmetric warfare today. In the earliest 19th century, the only proven asymmetric defense against ships of the line seemed to be Chapman's gunboats.

carlton_bach · Sep 23, 2011

tallwingedgoat said:
That's very interesting. I've never heard of Deomologos. Did the Dutch floating batteries ever see action? I'm curious how they would actually perform against ships of the line.

It's what we would call asymmetric warfare today. In the earliest 19th century, the only proven asymmetric defense against ships of the line seemed to be Chapman's gunboats.

Gunboats were around much earlier. Chapman merely improved the design. I don't know about the dutch floating batteries, but more generally, such defenses were pretty effective. One reason Copenhagen drew such attention was that normally, a fleet sailing into a defended harbour would lose. This was why the British throughout the Napoleonic Wars spent so much time and resources blockading the French fleet. If it had just been a matter of concentrating enough firepower and sailing into Brest and Toulon, they'd have done that.

On the whole, an early ironclad would most likely have performed very well for its mission, but its mission would have been extremely limited. Harbour defense by floating batteries would only ever come up in the event you could (for whatever reason) not build fixed ones, and most military and civilian ports had those in spades. An armoured floating battery migh come up as a siege weapon to augment bomb vessels - it did in the Crimean War - but I suspect even then, the sheer unseaworthiness of the design would make it unmanageable.

Mackon · Sep 23, 2011

tallwingedgoat said:
I'm aware of the history of ironclad development, as a reaction from Paixhans guns etc. But what if the ironclad precedes shell gun design. Suppose you take the hull of the CSS Virginia back to Napoleonic times, remove the steam engine and replace it with sail/horse powered paddles, change the guns to the most powerful available in that age. How would traditional navies deal with it?

Were there actually horse powered ships in use at some point?

carlton_bach · Sep 23, 2011

Mackon said:
Were there actually horse powered ships in use at some point?

Yes, but the horses pulled them on ropes. We have designs for paddlewheel-driven ox-powered vessels from Late antiquity onwards, but there seem to be no records of any ever being succesfully launched.

David S Poepoe · Sep 23, 2011

tallwingedgoat said:
That's very interesting. I've never heard of Deomologos. Did the Dutch floating batteries ever see action? I'm curious how they would actually perform against ships of the line.

Latin is not my first, or second language, I misspelled Fulton's battery it was the Demologos - 'the People's Voice' or something like that.

Thiel · Sep 23, 2011

I can't really see it happen. First of all, the cost of producing enough iron to effectively armour the ships is going to be enormous in a world that has only just begun to industrialize.
Secondly, I'm not sure it would convey that big an advantage. While the ironclad will have the advantage in armour, it won't have better guns and it'll most likely be quite a bit slower and harder to manoeuvre.
At the time even state of the art gunnery were incapable of keeping a more mobile opponent from closing.
This means that while the iron clad may be immune to the wooden ships gunnery, the wooden ship will still be able to control the engagement.
On the face of it it appears to be a stand-of, and I suspect that would be how most engagements would end up, however due to its higher mobility the wooden ship should be better able to press home for a boarding action.

tallwingedgoat · Sep 23, 2011

Mackon said:
Were there actually horse powered ships in use at some point?

Yes, they were reinvented and horse ferries were popular in North America in the early 19th century. They would've been a lot more common but for the fact that by then the steam age was already upon them.

The earlier type was the treadwheel ferry first patented in 1819.

A more advanced form, the belt drive treadmill, followed in the late 1820s. They were widely used from the 1840s to the early 20th century.

The treadmill was a major advancement harnessing the power of the horse. Farmers used treadmill threshers until the 1920s. Before the age of Steampunk, there was briefly the age of Horsepunk.

tallwingedgoat · Sep 23, 2011

carlton_bach said:
Yes, but the horses pulled them on ropes. We have designs for paddlewheel-driven ox-powered vessels from Late antiquity onwards, but there seem to be no records of any ever being succesfully launched.

Paddle technology is pretty ancient.

Roman paddle boat:

800px-De_Rebus_Bellicis%2C_XVth_Century_Miniature.JPG

Chinese paddle boat and war Junk:

RGB · Sep 23, 2011

Song, Jin and Yuan all used paddle-ships in appreciable amounts. They weren't meant to operate outside rivers and coastal areas, AFAIK, but they were pretty effective in confined spaces.

tallwingedgoat · Sep 23, 2011

Thiel said:
I can't really see it happen. First of all, the cost of producing enough iron to effectively armour the ships is going to be enormous in a world that has only just begun to industrialize.
Secondly, I'm not sure it would convey that big an advantage. While the ironclad will have the advantage in armour, it won't have better guns and it'll most likely be quite a bit slower and harder to manoeuvre.
At the time even state of the art gunnery were incapable of keeping a more mobile opponent from closing.
This means that while the iron clad may be immune to the wooden ships gunnery, the wooden ship will still be able to control the engagement.
On the face of it it appears to be a stand-of, and I suspect that would be how most engagements would end up, however due to its higher mobility the wooden ship should be better able to press home for a boarding action.

Nigh invunerability would be a massive asset. The USS Virginia was also pretty safe from boarding when buttoned up. Although it would be expensive, this is nothing early 19th century industry can't handle.

However Carlton Bach's point is quite valid. It would have a limited role that was mostly filled by coastal fortifications. Although the ability to mass floating forts would be very useful, they would probably not be cost effective. Fixed fortifications will last decades, and ships of the line would have a higher return on investment from its larger role. It would be useful to a country that have no need for long range naval power projection but is at grave danger from foreign navies.

phx1138 · Oct 11, 2011

carlton_bach said:
On the whole, an early ironclad would most likely have performed very well for its mission, but its mission would have been extremely limited. Harbour defense by floating batteries would only ever come up in the event you could (for whatever reason) not build fixed ones, and most military and civilian ports had those in spades. An armoured floating battery migh come up as a siege weapon to augment bomb vessels - it did in the Crimean War - but I suspect even then, the sheer unseaworthiness of the design would make it unmanageable.

I'd agree. Shore batteries were easier & more practical. Ironclad ships only become really useful once steam power is reasonably mature. Demologos was an intriguing approach to the limitations of paddlewheels (vulnerability to fire the obvious one): she was a catamaran. If you add Fitch's screw (c 1797) to steam power (for which you'd appear to need something like Trevithick's high-pressure engines, & high boiler pressures were asking for trouble at that time, with the likelihood of explosion), you get genuinely useful warships immune to the 19th Century guns, which didn't have HE. (It's true, most of the ironclads had a couple of inches of iron over, in some cases, over a foot of oak.

) If you don't like the hazard of ironclads, you could substitute cotton bales in a pinch...

In the ACW, both sides did it, & it worked pretty well by what I've seen...

Anticlimacus · Oct 11, 2011

In 1522 the Knights of St. John built the "Saint Anne". It was a 3000 tons. armoured ship.

dgharis · Oct 11, 2011

By the time metallurgy is sufficiently advanced to allow practical steam powered ships it's also advanced enough to make naval guns powerful enough to defeat any reasonable amount of armor that such a ship could carry.

And the guns are always going to be ahead of the armor. The reason is simple. Suppose, for sake of argument, that your ship requires an inch of armor over the vitals, say a thousand tons total weight, to protect against shells from my naval guns, which weigh fifty tons each. If I now adopt new naval guns weighing one hundred tons you have to increase the armor thickness to two inches, which adds an extra thousand tons of weight to your ship.

Say my ship mounts four such guns; for an extra two hundred tons of guns I force you to add a thousand tons of armor to offset them. Assuming our ships are the same displacement I gain a weight advantage of eight hundred tons, which I can use for bigger engines, more or bigger guns, some armor of my own, or whatever. An increase in the size of guns will result in a larger advantage than an equivalent weight increase in armor can offset.

Analytical Engine · Oct 11, 2011

Using metal cladding may be useful for ships before gunpowder weapons.

You could use it to pad against battering rams, or be used by ships that used incendiary weapons. (Hmm, Byzantine ironclad fireships...

)

(IOTL, the first western ironclads were built by the French, by the way.)

NHBL said:
One problem with earlier ironclads is the quality of the iron. I'm not sure if earlier iron would resist cannon shot--or simply shatter.

In such a case, early ironclads may well be Swedish, since their iron was one of the best quality in Europe due to its low sulphur content.

Actually, that might be an interesting PoD...

carlton_bach · Oct 11, 2011

Analytical Engine said:
Using metal cladding may be useful for ships before gunpowder weapons.

Depending on how you read the meaning of naos kataphraktos, there is a good chance that Hellenistic engineers did that. It doesn't seem to have done too much good.