cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/16948226
Neat. Lot of experimentation during the civil war. In high school was supposed to do a report on the Monitor and Merrimack, ended up reading like ten books on all the different ironclad variants. People were just like “let’s attach metal to this boat”
Sort of. I’m sure you know, but for other people reading: The Merrimack was a wood hulled steam frigate that was retrofitted as an ironclad, but the Monitor was a radical design built from the start as an ironclad rather than being an existing ship with metal armor added later.
The two ships have almost a video level of countering of each other. The Merrimack (resurrected as the CSS Virginia ironclad) was slow, heavily armored, and sported many guns in fixed positions. The Monitor was fast, low to the water to make it a tiny target, and had only one gun but it was in a rotating turret. In their only battle against each other, the Merrimack tanked a bunch of incoming hits without suffering any critical damage while the Monitor maneuvered around it too fast to be hit.
Yes, and going beyond those two, which are the most famous, they were messing around with boats on the Mississippi too, which was often just retrofitting whatever was available with iron cladding. People did catch on that intentionally designed monitor style ships were more effective, it’s just interesting to see people trying things out (like with a lot of the posts in this community) because hey, we’re in a war and could die otherwise.
The wood paneling/shielding and old-style canon are almost quaint enough to make me not see the prototype for WW1 that this is. Ominous.