Thanks for posting these profiles. Have a few sailing ship kits. Like to build as 1/72 motorized w/o sails. Vintage slow (10-12 kt) gunboat with a few updates. Studied a few; find their hulls & decks awkward to figure out how/what to change.
Best thing to do is sketch out some ideas and work from there. If the kits come with plans, copy the hull design from there and try out various superstructure shapes and equipment and all.
I figured that Logan would've said something if you'd gone totally missing... :)
No kidding. He would have sounded the jailbreak alarm.
1632 is the start of quite a series and resulted in a continuing forum on Baen's Bar. Eric Flint is quite a character in person as well as a writer.
These are actually from my thread at Baen’s Bar! The series is pretty fun, but the arguments about tech, tactics, logistics, etc, in the Bar are even better.
Speaking of the Bar, here is another post I made earlier today with a design I’ve been fiddling with.
Since I started doing my drawings here, I’ve intended to do all the canon ones I could do. The timberclads stood out from the beginning as one I should do, but I’ve had problems for a while trying to figure out how I wanted it to look. The first thing I did was throw out some rather silly elements for a small river boat. The first was the four foot thick casemate. That would mean a significant amount of the ship’s beam would just be solid wood. The original timberclads only had about five inches of wood (they were light armor), for comparison. A couple feet would be perfectly fine and even Constitution herself only had 21 inch-thick sides. 48 inches would be insane, especially on a smaller riverboat.
The other one was the full catamaran hulls. In a river boat, catamaran hulls don’t give any advantage over full ones. Instead of that, I stretched the definition to include some stern paddle-wheelers like the Cairo (which I based my design on), the Essex, and the Benton. In all three of those designs, the hull is one piece until you get to the paddlewheel at the stern, where it splits into two wrapping around the paddle wheel. The Benton was originally a full catamaran snag boat called the Submarine No. 7. When it was converted into a gunboat, the first thing the owner did was plank in the two hulls to get more storage space for stores, coal, water, and ammo.
Having selected the Cairo as the basic model (due to the publicity of it being raised in the 60s and turned into a museum and the excellent National Parks Service blueprints of her), I thought about sizes. The ironclad was easy to size since it was mentioned as being about 30 feet longer than the nearly 150 foot long sailing ironclad they were building for Gustav. The timberclads were not, just mentioned as being somewhat smaller. I initially went with 100 feet long, 25 feet wide, and with a 3 foot draft, based on the dimensions of the Eider Canal. This resulted in an incredibly-cramped design for twelve guns, the crews to man them, coal bunkers, the steam engine and boilers, and the ability to manage to sail across the English Channel. I tried to eek everything out on that hull form, which was also substantially narrower than the Cairo’s proportions (175’ x ~50’ x 6’), even resorting to trickery like slicing off the “knuckles” on the beam of the ship and making them removable, increasing the beam to about 32 feet when they were installed. I did eventually give up on that size for the book timberclads, but did develop a small, two-gun riverboat based on that hull-form. With two carronades or a mortar and a very low profile, it would be just fine for operating on the total extent of the Danube, for instance.
The ship languished there for a while until I started reading Myron Smith’s Tinclads and Timberclads books and learning the original ships and how combat was done on the rivers. What shocked me when I was reading was the dimensions of the original three timberclads (Tyler/Taylor, Lexington, and Conestoga). They were all fairly long, two of them about as long as my ironclad design, but they all had much narrower beams than I expected. I decided to go back and try again, but this time with a bigger ship that actually had room for everything. I used the Cairo as a basis for the hull design again, but narrower for her length. The only parts that stayed the same were the smokestacks and paddlewheel cover, the casemate looks the same but every proportion of it is different. My aimed goal was 140’ x 40’ x 4’ for the length, beam, and draft. It ended up being those dimensions at the start of the raked bow, which added a few feet to the final length. Notable changes I made to the original design were bringing the rudders underneath the stern to reduce their vulnerability and adding a bit of sheer to the hull like the Essex had. A trick riverboats could do was have the keel inside. To strengthen the hull, I picture it with five keel structures going forward and aft. One on the centerline, two outboard, and then two more at the corners of the lower hull. The two middle ones then form the inner walls of the paddlewheel well and the rudders are attached to the ends of them where they protrude from the stern. More bulkheads going side to side form a series of watertight compartments throughout the lower hull, spaces to put stores, coal, water, ammo, and leaving an open area in the center to place the boilers in (protruding with the condensers and engines above into the casemate).
I didn’t put anything on the upper deck besides a representation of the conning tower and a pair of Mitrailleuse fore and aft. I’m including a larger copy of the latter to show some of the details. It’s based on a diagram of a French one from the Franco-Prussian War, with a naval mount inspired by the Hotchkiss guns. The real ship would have plenty of unarmored deckhouses, including cabin space for the officers, as well as davits for boats set in for greater protection from the sea.
I envision three different ship designs all based on the same hull and machinery with each of them focusing on one particular thing. They are:
Timberclad-A (the one in the books and replicated here), well-balanced design with a large number of guns and the heaviest armor.
Timberclad-B: Based on the uptime USS Neosho and Osage ironclads and my mini-gunboat I mentioned earlier in this post (which I’m attaching to it too, to give an idea of the shape). Heavily rounded armor and a pair of long guns or a large mortar in either a turret or bulwark. Focus for this one is heavy guns. The picture I’m attaching is the basic drawing I was working on for the smaller ship, but it’s roughly the same design, just scaled up.
Timberclad-C: Based on the original Timberclad’s hull form. Lighter armor, but much more cargo space for men and supplies. I’m currently working on drawing this one and I’ll go for the full Timberclad look for now, which means a second deck aft, with open bulwarks ahead of them. I envision them equipped with extra tackle so an embarked artillery company can put their guns up there and use them to beef up the ship’s armament.
Finally, here it is with other ironclads of the era to get an idea of size. The two SSIM ships are 1632 ones, the rest are Union and Confederate ironclads of the Civil War.