HMS Devastation

As originally conceived by Sir Edward Reed, the Devastation was a very clean design. After being rebuilt and late in life, the Devastation was overloaded with top hamper. The best feature of the original design was that the ship pioneered the more modern gun layout with two turrets with two heavy guns each that was standard until the early 20th Century. The most problematic feature was the low freeboard, although as a breastwork monitor, the Devastation was superior to the pure monitor which had such a low freeboard that at sea the deck would always be awash.

Another try at the CSS Virginia

This is another attempt at depicting, photographically, the CSS Virginia lying at anchor near Norfolk in early 1652.

The Spanish cruiser Cristobal Colon

Spain had purchased an Italian armoured cruiser of a very successful design to strengthen their cruiser force. The problem is that the Spanish authorities dissaproved of having the Italian 10in gun on their ship, so the Cristobal Colon was delivered without her main armament! The Cristobal Colon was driven ashore, a wreck, at Santiago Bay, in 1898, with wooden guns for the main armament. Ten ships of the class were built. Five of them were sold to foreign navies and the next three were used by the Italian navy. The last two ended up in the Japanese navy as the Nisshin and Kasuga.

The www.history.navy.mil website is really hurting

I keep trying to access images from the NAVAL HISTORICAL CENTER website and continually am aggravated by the website performance. I was looking for more pictures of Confederate ironclads. This time I wanted to see pictures of the CSS Richmond. I am still waiting, several minutes later. The pictures tend to be under 100K in size, so what is the deal?

Real photographs of the CSS Albemarle

I had not realized that there were actual photographs of the Confederate ironclad CSS Albemarle. Admittedly, they were taken after the Albemarle was salvaged, but nonetheless, we know what the ship really looked like. AmericanCivilWar.com has a page with the photographs.

The Russian cruiser Askold

I think that the Russian cruiser Askold really betrays her German origin. The entire conception is very strange, with the low hull, the first level superstructure, and five funnels. This picture apparently shows the ship off Port Arthur in 1904 in gray wartime garb.

More on the Manassas

The more that I look at the Manassas picture, the more that it is obvious that it was an advanced concept. The ship was intended to be six feet above water and 17ft below the water line. The curved deck was almost an early example of a protective deck, with a bit more arch than was typical. One problem was that the armour was too thin. It seems to have been all that the displacement could carry. The Manassas was about 143ft long and had sharp ram shape forward, where the curve of the deck came down to a point below the water. The ram protruded 10 feet forward and seems to have been part of a solid block of wood about twenty feet long. In service, the ram seems to have been not solid enough to penetrate the side of a ship, since in about three attacks, ships were damaged but not holed. I was interested to read that David Dixon Porter had hoped to save the Manassas as an "engineering curiosity", but the ship was on fire, drifted downstream, blew-up, and sank before it could be rescued.