the "most decisive" naval battle of the Civil War: two invulnerable pieces of shit engage each other at dawn, blast each other with cannon at point blank range for hours, inflict insignificant damage on each other despite the CSS Virginia (triangle) taking 97 hits and the USS Monitor (circle) taking 22, and then retreat with both sides claiming victory, each having misinterpreted the other as giving up, accomplishing nothing. later the Monitor would sink due to being exposed to weather while in the ocean, and the Virginia would be burnt down and exploded by the Confederates because it was too stupid to do anything or go anywhere, but they couldn't let the Union forces have it
- Take a boat, any steam boat will do.
- Wrap it in bales of cotton.
- Give it whatever guns you have at hand.
- Wikipedia tells me that you put sharpshooters on top.
- Wikipedia tells me that you also have gangplanks and "horse marines" - cavalrymen that have left the horses behind.
- Give it a ram.
- RAMMING SPEED!
- Sink the actual union warships via ramming or have horse marines board the ship via gangplanks and take it.
- THE SOUTH WILL SINK AGAIN
this era of naval warfare is very funny to me because everyone who built one of these was so enamoured with the idea of a ship that was basically immune to gunfire at the time that they were willing to just ignore/put up with the fact they couldn't handle poor weather or open ocean, and were slower than literally any other kind of boat.
So it was more like a mobile coastal defence battery than a ship, near useless offensively but if you had one in the right place at the right time and the other guy didn't then you could hold & defend a position.
as you may know we live in a timeline where explosives won over armour so within a few decades that style of ironclad was getting clowned on by ships with newer engines, targeting and guns that let them engage from a distance and stay at that distance but for a while sinking one of these was like siege warfare
can you imagine if naval design & doctrine was still at this point when WW1 broke out?
I think one of the most important ways to understand how naval arms and doctrine developed is that it's basically what you wasted your country's whole GDP on before we had nukes, down to the approach of 'we will spend millions and millions to develop some real stupid bullshit on the off chance it's the next big thing and wins us a war', and that one of the major defining pieces of documentation for how WW2 played out was strategic arms limitations, but for big boats
In this analogy, what the confederates were doing is trying to enrich uranium in their bathtubs, with predictable results
These were the same guys who seriously considered strapping two cannons together and firing chain-linked shot out of them to looney-toons through entire regiments, but in an era before any technology that would make synchronized firing possible on a mechanical or materials level, so results like killing half the crew, missing the target, and chopping down a nearby forest were considered incredible successes
As a tangent though, no class of ship has ever had a moniker as cool as Ironclad (although Dreadnought comes close)
