Greatest Ironclad Warship

[NoodleNaught]

Had war actually come between the US and UK in the 1860s, the number of US ironclad warships would have been irrelevant, because the UK could have blockaded the US Eastern coastline, landed troops anywhere, won any naval battle imaginable, and generally ruined our ****. Sorry, but that's the way it was.

So they would have been able to land troops anywhere they wanted to get thier arses kicked. Not very useful to lose alot of battles in the long run.

[Al B. Sure!]

The Canadian pre-teen is right on this one... Assuming a united US, there's now way the US military would lose to the Brits in the 1860's. They didn't win the War of 1812. Granted, most of the British Army was fighting Napoleon during that war but it's not like they would have been capable of handling the logistics of a massive trans-Atlantic invasion in the 1860's either.

[NoodleNaught]

Uh itsn't 16 in the mid teens? Also if the US military did lose a few battles, it wouldn't mean much as they were fighting on home ground with a massive manpower, and supply advantage.

[Al B. Sure!]

I googled and found this on a forum referencing some now-defunct website so I can't confirm the veracity of these numbers but:

Essentially, the British had an army of 220,000 regulars, 120,000 militiamen and raised about 250,000 volunteers in the early 1860's. The regular army at home was stable at about 100,000 men, India took about 60-70,000 men (plus 150,000 Indian regulars and about 70-80,000 irregulars), the Med about 20,000 and Canada/ North America about 20,000, with the remaining 10-20,000 mostly split between a division in South Africa and a division in New Zealand (the Army Corps that fought in China in the early 1860's was drawn from the British-Indian Army).

The only other colonial force of note is the fairly large Canadian Militia, which kept ca 67,000 trained and equipped men. Other colonies had militias but they were generally small (although NZ and Victoria had mobilised theirs for NZ)

So about just under 1 million men dispersed throughout the Empire.

The Union Army meanwhile...

Of the 2,213,363 men who served in the Union Army during the Civil War,

As for the Confederacy...

Estimates of enlistments throughout the war were 1,227,890 to 1,406,180.

yeah. Good luck, Brits, on that one. Taking on 3.5 million men with a trans-Atlantic invasion Who cares if they dominate the seas. They can't take on the US on land.

[NoodleNaught]

Yeah that all sounds pretty much right. Though assuming the British were able to mount a transalantic invasion, and keep thier troops supplied and so forth. After about a decade they would have the manpower advantage, but by then any public support for the war would have already been long since removed.

[Al B. Sure!]

Remember, the British had to rely heavily on mercenaries during the American Revolution and probably during the War of 1812 as well. The British never had much in the way of manpower.

[Al B. Sure!]

Oh yeah and we have an example of the British Army of the period in the Crimean War... yeah, that went real well for the Brits

[NoodleNaught]

Well they did win the war.

[Al B. Sure!]

Not really... and remember, it was the British, French, Sardinians, and Ottomans COMBINED against the Russians. And the British were notoriously ineffective and arrogantly so... the Charge of the Light Brigade is but one example.

[BeBMan]

The French won the Crimean War.

[Snotty]

Your boat still sank In rough water, of all places. Who could have predicted such a thing?

Whats the source of your 3.6 million fighting men? How many were irregulars? A bunch of guys holdings guns does not an army make.

To put this exaggeration in perspective, modern India (1.18 Billion people) has a standing army of 1.3 million, and an irregular force of 2.1 million.

[Al B. Sure!]

And yet SOMEBODY got their asses kicked in both the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812

[Asher]

The USA?

[bc1871]

The first true upgrade since HMS Warrior, and also the first ironclad to carry the 9-inch (230 mm) muzzle-loading rifle

HMS BELLEROPHON

Type Central battery ironclad
Launched 26 May 1865
Hull Iron
Propulsion Screw
Builders measure 4270 tons
Displacement 7551 tons
Guns 15
Fate 1922
Class
Ships book ADM 135/42
Note 1892 guard ship.
1904 = Indus III, t.s.

[bc1871]

HMS Inflexible

Builder: Portsmouth Dockyard

Cost: £812,000
Laid down: 24 February 1874
Launched: 27 April 1876
Commissioned: 5 July 1881
Fate: Scrapped 1903
General characteristics
Displacement: 10,880 tons
11,880 tons full load
Length: 320 ft (98 m) pp
344 ft (105 m) oa
Beam: 75 ft (23 m)
Draught: 26.3 ft (8.0 m)
Propulsion: 12 coal fired boilers, two single-expansion Elder and Co. steam engines, 2 twin-bladed 20 ft (6.1 m) diameter screws
Speed: 14.73 knots (27 km/h) @ 6,500 hp (4.8 MW)
Range: "Cross-Atlantic at economical speed"
Complement: 440-470
Armament: 4 × 16-inch (406.4 mm) 80-ton muzzle-loading rifles, 2 per turret 6 × 20-pounder breech loaders, replaced in 1885 with BL 4-inch (100 mm) guns, and replaced in 1897 with QF 4.7-inch (120-mm) guns
17 × machine guns
4 × 14-in (360 mm) torpedo tubes (two submerged bow tubes, two on carriages)
Armour: 24-in (610 mm) waterline belt + 17-in (432 mm) teak
3-in (76 mm) deck
20-in (508 mm) citadel (reducing to 16 inches) + 21-in (533 mm) teak
17-in (432 mm) front, 16-inch back, turrets
22-in bulkheads, reducing to 14 inches (360 mm)