EdThomas wrote:Reality check time,
The Delthak's have a freeboard of 11.5 ft.Wave ht at wind speeds -
Beaufort force 4 13 knots - 3' waves
Beaufort force 5 19 " - 6' waves
Beaufort force 6 25 " - 9' waves
Beaufort force 7 31 " - 12' waves
Beaufort Force 8 37 " - 18' waves
Beaufort force 9 44 " - 21' waves
http://www.peardrop.co.uk/beaufort.htm
The period of a wave is the time and distance between crests. In the open ocean, distance between crests in Force 9 winds can be 100 to 150 yards. Wave period decreases as body of water narrows. The Tarot Channel is a narrow body of water where waves would be much closer together (shorter period) than in the middle of the Anvil. Delthak would have been facing 20' waves in her struggle in the Tarot Channel, not 10-15'. Only ocean racing sailboats and military vessels try to go into winds over force 8. Sailboats, and steamers, will run with the wind, not into the wind and waves, Unless there's an island or continent in that direction, in which case you're in deep caca and in for some serious discomfort.
Going back to my comments about tide. Tidal currents moving against wind create very steep waves with a very short period. Try to imagine 15' waves about 100' apart.
In anything up to a Force 7 blow or adverse wind/tide conditions in a narrow bay or channel (Bay of Bess, Hankey Bay, Tarot Channel), the Delthaks are going to be able to fight in up to 30 knots of wind. These ladies are NOT fair weather fighters.
In general, if a boat can fit between the wave crests, the bow will ride up and over oncoming waves. (and be able to fight)
I’m afraid that this last sentence is more than a bit . . . optimistic.
I’d put together a lengthy post explaining why this is the case, but it got deleted somehow in the process of posting it
, so I’ll probably be briefer this time.Anyway, there’s a difference between a ship’s “freeboard” (technically defined as the distance between the designed waterline and the weather deck [i.e., the lowest deck exposed to weather]) and the height of a gundeck’s port sills above the designed waterline. For example, the freeboard of a three-decked ship-of-the-line might be as much as 30 feet, but the type’s lowest gun ports were seldom much more than 10 feet above waterline and frequently quite a bit less. (British designs of any given rate usually had lower freeboard’s — and thus lower port sill heights above waterline — than their larger French opponents, whereas the early American liners were dreadful in this respect, despite the fact that they were larger even than French designs of the same nominal rate because the Americans insisted on arming a “74” with up to 90 guns once the carronades were added.) This is the reason that frigates like Edward Pallew’s Indefatigable could fight ships-of-the-line in rough weather; the frigate’s single gundeck was higher than the ship-of-the-line’s lower gundeck, which meant they had similar numbers of usable guns. In Indefatigable’s case, the fight was made still closer to even by the fact that the “frigate” was a “razee” — a ship-of-the-line which had been cut down by one armed deck— and carried the same armament on her remaining gundeck that she had when she was a ship-of-the-line (like the USN’s Independence (which went from being an all but useless ship-of-the-line into one of the finest frigates ever built).
I’ve made the point repeatedly in comparing Charisian galleons to their opponents that Charisian ships have traditionally mounted their broadside weapons higher than the opposition (primarily for the express purpose of being able to fight more efficiently in unfavorable weather), which has in turn required the Charisian ships to have greater displacements in order to be able to carry the heavy weight of their guns at such heights without dangerously sacrificing stability. (For an example of what can happen when stability is compromised, consider the fate of Gustavus Adolophus’ Vasa in the 1620s, when she foundered after sailing for something less than two kilometers on her maiden voyage.)
The conditions under which a ship with broadside weapons can fight her guns and the conditions which would actively threaten that ship’s seaworthiness can be quite different. Assuming that the gunport lids can be properly sealed and that they are strong enough to stand the pounding of heavy seas (and that the pumps are sufficient to keep up with the water which is going to find its way inboard anyway), it doesn’t really matter if the ports themselves are close to the waterline. However, that’s not the case if they have to be opened so that the guns can be used. This is why in many real-world instances, sailing ships found it difficult or even impossible to use their lower deck guns to leeward (see preceding paragraph). The force of the wind heeled them over, effectively reducing freeboard (and hence the height of their guns above water) on the leeward side — sometimes by over half — which made it unsafe to open their lower deck ports. If I remember correctly, at least one of the French ships lost at Quiberon Bay flooded through her lower deck ports during the engagement.
There are some additional factors to consider where powered vessels are concerned. Sail powered ships are restricted in terms of the angles relative to the wind (and hence usually to the direction from which waves are coming) which they can maintain; steam powered vessels can (at least theoretically) steam at any angle to the wind. In fact, there are going to be sea conditions under which a powered vessel has to adjust its heading for survival’s sake, but the range of options available to the commander of a steamer are much greater than those available to the commander of a sail-powered vessel. In addition, wave height doesn’t necessarily provide an accurate measure of freeboard. To conceptualize what I mean, visualize a wave simply rolling across the open sea, and then visualize that same wave striking a cliff. The upsurge of water when a wave strikes the side of a ship is going to reach significantly higher than the typical wave crest’s height. Thus a 13-foot wave might easily break as much as 20 feet up a ship’s side. In fact, it would probably wash higher than that, but much would depend upon the angle of impact between the wave and the vessel’s side. A steamer’s ability to sail at a wider range of angles relative to the direction of wind and wave may well make that worse, and the sheer speed with which a steamer can move through the water (a typical sailing ship is doing phenomenally well to make 12 knots) produces its own wave action which can send water up the side of the ship for 10 or 15 feet even under relatively calm conditions. In the pre-dreadnought and dreadnought eras, secondary guns were often mounted in hull-level casemates; post World War One, no navy mounted guns in those positions, because they had finally realized that any gun mounted directly in a ship’s side was going to be washed out in heavy sea conditions. (USS Deleware and her sister carried their foremost secondary guns in sponsons right forward, and they were never usable in anything except a dead calm because of the combination of normal wave action and bow wave. Even in a calm, water washed in through them at anything much above 15 knots.)
This means Dilandu has hit the nail exactly on the head when he suggests that the original Delthak design would be enormously disadvantaged under typical conditions off soundings. This, in fact, is going to be true for virtually any ironclad designed with a sufficiently shallow draft to operate under riverine or canal conditions. They simply can’t have a sufficiently deep draft to carry their guns sufficiently high above the water to work them effectively in a broad range of normal oceanic weather conditions and still be sufficiently stable to survive under typical Atlantic conditions.
There are some things which can be done to improve the ability of a broadside mount to operate under less than favorable conditions. For example, in a typical casemate mounting the gun is fitted with a shield, affixed to the mount and not to the side of the ship, which traverses along with the gun and closes the port against incoming fire. Gun shields aren’t necessarily watertight, however, and this meant that gundecks tended to get washed out aboard those aforementioned pre-dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts. Eventually, the designers figured out that any mount in a ship’s side was going to experience problems with letting and simply stopped putting them there. (Casemate mounts at the weather deck level — in other words, at the base of the superstructure, stepped back from the edge of the weather deck — avoided most of the problems with hull-mounted guns .) In the case of the Iron Duke-class ships, the Brits faced sufficiently severe flooding problems with hull-mounted guns that they came up with a solution which fitted rubber gaskets to the gun shields, which was actually quite successful. In fact, they applied the same solution to the Queen Elizabeths and Revenges. Ultimately, however, hull-mounted guns were abandoned because they were still too close to the water for tactical reasons. A gun mounted close to the water suffers from spray and blast interference; a gun mounted higher in the ship does not suffer from spray interference (at least under typical weather conditions), although blast effect can still be a problem if the gun mounts are too close together or if a main battery weapon’s muzzle blast impacts on the casemate mount when it fires. Spray is less of a problem for director-controlled guns than for guns without director control, because in those instances the actual gun sights are distant from the weapon itself and high above water level. For guns which have to be laid on target by their on-mount crews, however, spray is a very significant problem. If they can’t see the target, they can’t possibly hope to hit it.
The later Charisian ironclads will have casemate gun shields, which may (or may not) significantly affect their ability to handle poorer sea conditions, but the fact that if a ship is designed to operate in water depths of, say, 10 feet is always that’s going to mean that it will be . . . disadvantaged under blue water constraints.
The coastal ironclads will be less disadvantaged in that regard, but they will still be inferior to a “proper” blue water design. In terms of being able to hammer sailing galleons, it’s unlikely (shall we say) that an unarmored galleon could hope to survive against one of them under any conditions which would allow the galleons to fight effectively, of course, but the degree to which that might be true could vary considerably. Frankly, the biggest problem of the coastal ironclads is that they still have to be relatively small vessels in proportion to their gun power and armor in order to operate in shallow water (i.e., water deeper than a canal/river but still close enough inshore to restrict depths), and that means that even though they may be designed to be good seaboats, they can’t do that and still fit in the bunkerage for enough coal to give them great steaming endurance. That’s a point I’ve made in reference to the King Haarahlds in several posts. The Delthak II-class design is intended for riverine conditions, and so will have even shorter endurances and will carry its guns closer to the water. The Eraystor-class design (which I think I’ve mentioned a time or two) will be true coastal ironclads, with properly casemated guns, but they will still be hull-mounted weapons (and hence vulnerable to being washed out/flooded/blinded in moderate or severe weather), and their bunkerage will still be sufficiently limited to restrict their cruising endurance/operational radius and thus their ability to self-deploy to the distances Charisian strategy will require.
And, no, I haven’t given you the details on either the Delthak II or Eraystor designs.
Are the City-class coastal ironclads Domnyk Staynair thinks about in Snippet 8 the Eraystors or yet another class the Charisians are building? 
And, yes, it sounds like just the kind of thing people would do.