American Civil war gunboats...

[mizzarrogh]

I had not seen that much details about this type of shallow hull old time steam warships built for the river defense before.

How Ed Bearss Found the USS Cairo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91kZZalwRhM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8FhlrE3C6I&t=612s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvkAYRNusJU

As a swede, i am obviously familiar with the battleship Monitor and her sisters, and what happened to the both ships involved, but anyway, this ship just draws me in more and more the more details one discover, like the ships engine, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcB0hhRLOVw&t=394s


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gN5bttadERs

[James Harrison]

Thans for sharing, this is fascinating. 

[mizzarrogh]

I like the idea of hawing the actual ship as the reference and the reconstruction of the chamber inside, including the captains, and the total number of men in the crew and the interesting mix of people who served in the crew and helped improve the ship if needed, like the rail track armor, also the story of the men hiding in a pit and detonating the for it's time i assume very modern electric mine that sink the first giant "invincible" river steel fortress (but luckily did not killed the crew), i had never seen the massive open type boiler construction either before. It's as he said in the video interesting to see how technically advanced the revolvers (i know the word revolver seem to have a much broader meaning in the US than it has in Europe, but i guess anyone know instantly anyway what i am referring to here in this context...) where, but the standard army rifles where built to always function and being easy and cheap to repair in the field (i know because my father gave me one of the Swedish equivalent from this era, i am not 100 about the US navy, but from the construction, to me those rifles found onboard looks more like infantry rifles and not as navy rifles (my father has a Swedish navy rifle from this era and those have a different construction and where made of a shiny "stainless" alloy), so probably the crew did use regular infantry rifles and not dedicated navy rifles, perhaps it had to do with the distribution of pre loaded ammo cartridges or something like that, i don't know... Or the US navy simply did not had that large amount of especially built navy rifles, so they had to prior the ships at sea perhaps? However they came with no actual benefit on a river ship anyway).

Only modern disadvantage with black-powder guns is that they are a minor heck to clean from burnt sulfur after firing, otherwise the barrel will be completely destroyed in a short time and the barrel will get clogged up after a certain number of bullets, that's why properly cleaning the guns where so important in the past, beside heating food and personal comfort, the hot water where probably also for solvents used to clean the barrel of your rifle with hot soap and oil (and preferably something that contains ammonia, i don't know exactly what they where using here, i think urine is too weak, but one newer know...).