- Joined
- Dec 3, 2011
- Location
- Laurinburg NC
Here is CSS Neuse, incidentally she never received her deck armour, one suggestion is that she was overweight.Rebelatsea,
Can you show an example of quarter ports?
When we consider the total effort involved in building and armoring the ship, four extra gunports doesn't seem like that much more work. The original Virginia had quarter ports for her fore and aft guns, but most of the later ironclads didn't. The later ships were much more maneuverable than Virginia; perhaps they felt that obviated the need.
I found the piece about the twist drill bit fascinating. That's what we think of as "a drill bit", funny to think of it as a new invention. I wonder what the earlier drill bits were like?
George Sinclair suggested closing the quarter ports and opening new ones to allow the 7" rifles to fire on the broadside.
Apparently the 7" gun captains complained that they could not add their weapons to the broadside, but why Sinclair wanted to close the quarter ports I don't know, unless he wanted to make the end armour continuous if you see what I mean.That would require rearranging the broadside ports to make room for six on each side, but I don't quite get why they'd have to close the quarter ports. The gun slide still has the same centerline pivot point, does it not? It would move past the quarter position going from center to broadside or v.v. That would also seem to place the broadside ports for the pivot guns directly opposite each other, as in Neuse.
How on Earth did they aim the things?!
The guns had back and fore sights, Brooke's 7" could be ranged up to 4,000 yards.How on Earth did they aim the things?!
That gunport is too small in all directions. The "standard " Porter gun port was 3ft wide and 5ft high at maximum on the outside, tapered inward to allow roughly 5 degrees train either way and 5 degrees elevation.Yes, but...........to look at the above pic, the reinforcing (sp) band seems to be larger then the gunport thus blocking any view while attempting to aim.