Bombards and Battleships.

[Rook]

Anybody agree that steel comes too late in the game? I mean, what were the knights wearing if it wasn't steel armor? But steel doesn't come until the industrial age.

The problem is, the cannon ends up showing up after rifles, and that's just not right. My Civil War era rifles end up attacking along side catapults. Silly.

We need a siege unit to fit in between cannons and catapults. A bombard would do the trick. Make it a Str of 8 or 9.

Also, the destroyers in game are a long stretch from iron clads. We need something like the late 1800's battleships to fill the gap between ironclads and the modern destroyer and WWII era battleships.

[Hauptman]

Steel was around for thousands of years. But it was SOO labor intensive only small amounts could be made. It required folding and hammering... That took alot of time and labor for small items like swords and armor.

Then with the industrial era came pressure forging and mass refining/smelting etc. Now LARGE objects could be made of steel. That is what the steel tech signifies.


Steel is refined iron. Iron is soft and very susceptible to corrosion. An iron sword would bend under any stress, even under its own weight. But when you hammered out all the carbon and turned it into steel it became MUCH stronger.


An ironclad was a simple wooden ship with plates of iron bolted to the sides. It was heavy, slow, and couldnt handle rough seas. The iron was stronger than wood, but still iron.

With mass production of steel available, now you could use the stronger material to build the frame of the ship, wich could be larger and LIGHTER than an older ironclad. Couple that with newer powerplant technology and you have a much faster ship (more room for that powerplant and a lighter hull). It happened that fast in history too.

Monitor + Merimak in 1862. 1853 saw the first wind powered ironclads. Then destroyers in 1890 or so I believe. And in game turns the destroyer encompasses the old Dreadnaut type battle ship. Wich was just a bigger destroyer by later Battleship standards. Imma google this and possibly edit it if I'm way off on the dates.

[Hauptman]

Wow i was dead on on the 1890 date, but way off on my monitor vs merimak guess, heh. Its fixed in the post now.

[Hauptman]

Warship technology was advancing so rapidly from 1865-1906 that new battleships were often rendered obsolete within a few years of construction. This created a huge financial strain - by 1870, the British government was spending a staggering 37% of its annual national budget on the construction of new battleships.

Heh, wow.

[Rook]

OK, good points especially about steel, but. Didn't they use bronze to make cannons prior to the industrial revolution? We had cannons long before we had rifles.

[CerberusIV]

Originally posted by Rook
OK, good points especially about steel, but. Didn't they use bronze to make cannons prior to the industrial revolution? We had cannons long before we had rifles.

Yes, bronze cannon existed from the early days of gunpowder weapons in europe. But they were relatively rare and expensive, mostly used in sieges as they were not manouverable enough for the battlefield. Catapults, trebuchets and early cannon all took a while to set up so they could only be used to attack/defend static targets like cities and fortresses. That's a bit of a problem for the Civ IV combat system which gives catapults a combat value in open terrain that they just didn't really have in RL - so it is a compromise.

Iron cannon were used in warships from the early 16thC IIRC (Mary Rose, etc.) but were still expensive to make. Mobile field artillery and more widespread use of siege cannon really only comes in with the rise of nation states in the 17thC, a societal change that eventually partly drove the industrial revolution due to the greater availability of capital for investment in industrial processes.

[johnmcd]

quote:
Warship technology was advancing so rapidly from 1865-1906 that new battleships were often rendered obsolete within a few years of construction. This created a huge financial strain - by 1870, the British government was spending a staggering 37% of its annual national budget on the construction of new battleships.

Originally posted by Hauptman



Heh, wow.

Can you give a source for that, I just can't believe it.

[MikeH]

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/battleship

[johnmcd]

Originally posted by MikeH
http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/reference/battleship

That site credits it to Wikkipedia. I could imagine it might 37% of Military Spending but even that would be astronomical given the size of the British military at the time, the size of the standing army and the operations in which it was habitually involved.

1870 was the year that compulsory primary schooling was introduced in England (we Scots have it had it a good deal longer), I can't see that a nation weighed down by that sort of expense would simultaneously be
- expanding social provision
- revising child labour laws towards lower productivity

[Gueron]

Wouldn't the British Empire have been getting quite a bit from their empire (*cough* *cough* India) at that time. I'm from the U.S. and I don't claim to be an expert on World or European History, but Victoria should have been in power in the 1870s and she was one of the only (I'm estimating ) five rulers of the British Imperium.

[Ajala]

What's so hard to believe about the 37% number? Governments were alot different then (i.e. no nationalized health or social systems). The percentage of tax dollars spent on the military would naturally be much higher than today.

[johnmcd]

Basically, I’d like to see another source for that statistic or some context around it, was it actually funded by a massive number of government bonds? I've spent half an hour on Google and can't find anything like that number anywhere else, yet it's such a striking a figure I'd expect to find it elsewhere easily.

[Gueron]

Might find it here.

Military Spending

I haven't looked through the whole article yet, and I'm not the one that originally posted

[CerberusIV]

I hadn't heard the 37% figure for Britain but have come across claims for the Imperial Japanese government spending around 40% of their income on naval expenditure in the early 20th century. Given that the 1870's were a time of rapid technological change and that Britain was hell bent on maintaining naval supremacy, it's not an impossible estimate for total naval expenditure.

I would expect it to be total naval expenditure, including dockyards, overseas coaling stations, training establishments, etc., not just ships.

[johnmcd]

In the article Gueron references it shows an average of 36.7% of government expenditure on all military from 1870 to 1913 with military spending increasing over that time period. 1870 being the low point.