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I had the idea for this as I was mulling over some of the replies to this thread on ironclad warfare. Basically, the screw ram would operate much as a screw propeller does, except that it would have a metal spike or drill in place of the propeller. It could then be placed at the front of a ship to provide a kind of souped-up version of the standard naval ram, the drill giving it much greater penetration power.

The temporal setting for this would be the decades immediately after the ironclad warship first became common, say from about 1850 to 1880 or so. During this period torpedoes and armour-piercing shells hadn't yet come into widespread use, meaning that warships were now practically impossible to sink with cannons and old naval tactics were, consequently, obsolete. This led to a period of great innovation as navies sought a new way of defeating their enemies. Assume that during this period a country had come up with the idea of screw rams and tried equipping some of their ships with it -- how effective do you think it would have been in combat?
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