The Warships blog

Alexander van Maanen has the Warships blog where he and his father Ron are posting warship-related material, including photographs. For example, there are photographs of the Dutch ironclad Schorpioen, built a La Seyne. The ships originally had 2-9in MLR and that seems to be what the Schorpioen has now.

Modified ships

I am going to try my hand at a photograph of a modified version of HMS Resistance, the ironclad British battleship. I am thinking in terms of a "modernization".

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.