19th century naval warfare

AUTISM ALERT

Let’s talk about the change in naval tactics and technologies through the course of the second half of the eighteen hundreds.

Quick rundown for anons not knowing what I mean:
The transition from mainly wind driven ships to steam engines (paddle/screws), the change from classical cannons to breechloaders and the conversion from wooden hulls to iron/steel hulls.
Of course the mishmash between all the above welcomed, that’s what made that period so special.

Share stuff you have read, maybe what your country did to adapt to the frenetic changing times or about wars that took place in that very time period and where the changes of naval warfare were felt (Crimean war or First/Second Schleswig war for example).

Happy posting.

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hunley.org/history-is-made/
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894)
twitter.com/AnonBabble

First combat submarine to sink a warship
hunley.org/history-is-made/

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always wondered about a couple things:

Why didn't any Western, or anyone else, ever use a sailing catamaran for anything, particularly for stuff where being able to sail faster than the next guy would mean everything: blockage running, recon, raiding, etc. I hear even big ships of the line were highly vulnerable from behind, and even light longer range cannon could cripple their rigging easy. I'm pretty sure a few hundred years passed between Euros seeing Pacific Islanders cats and end of sail. Even if Pac-cats weren't too good you'd think someone would've done something.

#2) why didn't any overcrowded warships, normally "on station" for long periods and trying to keep (slowly starving) crews busy, ever seem to do any fishing? Lines, hooks and/or nets don't take up any space. Back then at certain spots I'm sure you could just about walk on schools of big fish. Only "fishing" I've heard about was FLYING fish that would land on decks and was considered a boon. All the Euros seemed to be fish eating cultures AT HOME.

Caring about things in great detail isn't autistic this is an interesting topic, I'm sick of the blanket terms constantly used here.

I'm not a ship-autist, but I would guess that, even assuming you could get around design complications, the fact that you'd have two smaller ships joined together by a deck rather than one single ship would create logistics and communications issues–it would be time-consuming and inconvenient to move supplies or ammunition from one hull to the other, and it seems to me that it would be much harder for the captain and officers to have a good awareness of what was happening in both hulls at once, and they'd have more difficulty relaying their orders quickly and effectively. My plebeian skim of Infogalactic also said that catamarans are more difficult to tak, which for a sailing ship could be an issue.

then again, these were the days when even with firearms, and beginning to have REPEATING firearms, battles were 95% fought with huge line after line of guys advancing at each other in open fields, just because the main thing was to keep your cannon fodder together for the slaughter.

Holy shit never knew that, the fucking mad lads rammed a ship with a boom stick.

Some parts of the crews probably did, but there is no way that one could supply a crew of over 800 men for multiple months just by fishing.

I just wanted to red text something to catch the eye of somebody looking through the catalogue, no worries.

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There is an entire chapter devoted to this exact topic in Captain Hughes and Adm. Girriers book on naval fleet tactics, I will have to re-read it and post some of it later

In the 18th century ships of the line were the primary combat vessels. Firing from the sides made it natural to position ships in a straight line. This had natural complications for both directing firepower and for sailing in line. Many navies were also composed of stolen ships (as they would not neccessarily sink them, allowing fleets to augment their own ships).

The first development designed around this tactic was to build more stacked decks= more guns on target. winning at the time was basically killing enough of the enemy to where they just gave up, which meant you would just walk over and they would surrender.

Cohesion was more valuable than speed using some of these sailing tactics. Doubling became a useful tactic.

Later, during the pax britanica and the industrial revolution, you saw a shift in the way ships fought. The British never built another wood ship after 1860, replacing the entire fleet from scratch. The dynamic shift of industrialization was you had to refuel ships with coal instead of having them rely on good seamanship skill to reliably use the winds which could be unpredictable. You saw a loss of range and endurance of fleets, but the british did still build sailing ships until around 1880 just to maintain endurance and strategic mobility. During the steam ships implementation, the the problem of heavy armor being better than the guns made rams a viable attack option. Ironclads became a type of vessel that could effectively be used against shore stations (in the bast it was seen as unheard of for a vessel to attack a fort, which would usually result in a loss). This time frame saw the development of explosive shells.

You also saw a large number of littoral barrels in the latter half of the 1800s, especially in the american civil war.

Findings of some of the few fleet battles in the late 1800s was that

*for a time in specific situations: the problem was that the more a column closed to concentrate firepower, the easier it was for it to get rammed. This is where you saw ideas come up that would produce similar tactics that would be used around WW2 and looked like British infantry square.

There were also several battles off the African coast and between japan and china that showed how bad of a tactic ramming actually was (hitting moving targets was not easy), which largely stopped the use of ramming. Look up the battle of the Yalu river en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894)

Basically by the end of the 19th century, guns became more important in the debate of tactics

Pretty much nailed it with line-ahead tactics. The Admiralty was viewed as the end all, be all of navy tactical knowledge. Nelson going out and splitting the French / Spanish lines only worked since every continental navy followed the line-ahead doctrine (also the Spaniards being legitimately retarded). It's mind blowing that Nelson was worshipped as a revolutionary figure afterwords for making a right turn. It's worth noting that the modern concept of battlefield mobility is very recent, and most ships of the line were barely sea worthy.