Last Sail and Coal Powered Royal Navy Battleship?

Saphroneth

Banned
I think I may have found a contender for the last coal and sail powered battleship. HMS Wivern was built in 1863, dispatched to Hong Kong in 1880 and remained there until sold for scrap until 1922.
Wivern is a really strange ship story-wise, as she was ordered for the Confederacy!

The tricky thing about her is that, while she was only about 2,500 tons, she was built in a period when that would have made her one of the larger ironclads in the world.

An intersting quote from wiki "On 3 October 1890 HMS Temeraire became the last ship of the Royal Navy to stand into harbour under sail alone at Suda Bay, Crete. With her crew handling sails and sheets, just as they had done under Nelson, Anson, Rodney and Howe, the fleet watched as she took five hours to slowly beat into harbour."
I imagine the fleet mostly stopped watching after the first hour or so.
 
I imagine the fleet mostly stopped watching after the first hour or so.
We often forget how slow ship movements were back in those days. When we look at (or play) the Battle of Trafalgar, as shown below, we forget that the closing speed of Nelson's two columns was at a walking speed. At 6am Nelson formed his two columns, 11:30am Nelson sends his famous signal to the fleet, and it's another 1 3/4 hours before Victory gets into the fight, and another few hours before the two fleets are fully entwined in battle.


Battle_of_Trafalgar,_Plate_1.jpg
 
But to increase the problem of the coal and sail ship, they were not designed purely as sailing vessels as were the ships of Nelson's day. They also weighed considerably more, what with all those metal engines and all. You can just hear the captain of the Temeraire thinking 'yeah, very nice, but can we just turn the engines on now."
 

Saphroneth

Banned
We often forget how slow ship movements were back in those days. When we look at (or play) the Battle of Trafalgar, as shown below, we forget that the closing speed of Nelson's two columns was at a walking speed. At 6am Nelson formed his two columns, 11:30am Nelson sends his famous signal to the fleet, and it's another 1 3/4 hours before Victory gets into the fight, and another few hours before the two fleets are fully entwined in battle.
Indeed - and this has interesting implications for any attempt to represent it in a game which doesn't take the whole day. If you want the outcome of a given manoeuvre to remain the same, you have a few options:

1) Increase rate of fire and speed, keep damage the same.
This is true to life but looks wrong - rapid fire cannons seem to do no damage at all.
2) Increase speed and damage, keep ROF the same.
This presents an ahistorical picture of ships being very fragile, and means that a situation where ships could historically get off a broadside they can in-game not have the time to reload.
3) Give up, portray ships as motorboats which go faster downwind, make up the damage and fire rate numbers.
Not ideal.


The same happens with games that simulate ironclad-era battles - the 15" gun on a late model Monitor fired once every quarter hour or less and would punch a ragged hole two feet across in an enemy ship, but the heavy guns on a more reasonably armed ship fire nearly twenty times as fast. (I worked this out recently - in the time between USS Monitor firing her first and second shots with each of her two cannons, the Warrior would be able to fire about two hundred 68-lber shot and eighty 7" shells with each broadside... so if the Monitor's gun fired once a minute in the game, the Warrior would look like a demented machine gun.)
 
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