"Firing into the Brown" #38 - Gunboats, drubbings, girders and stuff..

"So Carnehan weeds out the pick of his men, and sets the two of the Army to show them drill and at the end of two weeks the men can manoeuvre about as well as Volunteers. So he marches with the Chief to a great big plain on the top of a mountain, and the Chiefs men rushes into a village and takes it; we three Martinis firing into the brown of the enemy".

Kipling "The Man Who Would Be King"

Time for another update..

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The girder railway bridge construction has been completed. Just the one span as previously mentioned [clicky] and I also cut down the brick bridge supports significantly as this will be wargame terrain rather than model railway terrain between two fixed, raised, surfaces. 

To help with this usage I also built two ramps, one for each end of the bridge, these were made with foam board, covered with filler, and then with some embossed plastic sheet cut to size for the 'road' surface..  the plastic came from the same stash as the bridge and is printed with a planking type effect. I also used the same to surface the bridge..

As per the pictures they've had a spray coat of an epoxy grey primer, the next step is some paint, but that should be fairly quick and easy as I envision most of it being inks and washes..  bear with..

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The dams (last post) may have just been a brief rabbit hole, but it did lead to another...  got to love local history..  well at least the local history round where I live, which, as a military history fan and wargamer is chock full of places to look at.. 😁

Anyway..  this rabbit hole is to do with gunboats!

I wanted to find out a little more about what types of gunboats the Navy would have envisioned using in the Creek as part of the defence of the Hilsea Lines..  with the best will in the world, the Creek is not wide so any ship used would necessarily be small. Try as I might I haven't been able to find any specific references to which ships would have been used, but based on the location, the depth of water, the lack of space to manoeuvre, and more specifically the period of time the Lines were active, I am drawn to the conclusion that the boats used would have almost certainly been of the classic "flat iron" type [clicky] designed by Rendell (of Sir W G Armstrong & Company) and of which the Royal Navy "Ant class" and "Staunch class" are probably the perfect examples..

'Ant class' plans showing the RML 10-inch 18-ton gun in the bow behind armour plates that could be dropped when firing

HMS Staunch pictured in 1868 - good view of those hinged armour plated 'shields' that provided protection to the gun crew - better still the two crew give you an idea how small these beasts were.. 

All these Royal Navy "flat irons" would have been armed with rifled muzzle loaders, the Ant class boats had 10" [clicky], the Staunch class had 9" [clicky] - the following are (very good!) models but gives an idea of the relative sizes.. the one in the foreground is an Ant Class, with Staunch Class behind

Pictures and models courtesy of this amazing website - those are paper models!! Rendel Gunboats – Paper Shipwright

Bottom line - cheap as chips and nothing more than a floating gun platform, they were designed to float in a puddle so they can get close in shore, and were steam powered - in the case of these two classes they each had two 2-cylinder horizontal single-expansion steam engines powering twin screws, giving 7.5 to 8.5 kn. No masts or rigging meant the crews could be smaller - Ant Class had a complement of 30. In the second half of the 19th Century, the Royal Navy would have had over a 100 gunboats*, but they seem to have been a fairly short technological innovation as there were undoubtedly also downsides (could only work well inshore in sheltered water, they were slow, they made good targets, and had a relative lack of manoeuvrability). Their golden age would have been the 30 or 40 years from 1850 onwards, but they continued to be used in other functions once their primary purpose was no longer required..

The 250-ton/85-foot flat-iron 'Ant-class' gunboat, HMS Kite. Commissioned in 1871 and eventually sold out of the Navy in 1920, but pictured here serving just off the Belgian Coast in 1914 after she had been rearmed with 6 inch and 4.7 inch guns  

Fantastic rabbit hole to dive down - a very evocative design, and class, of ship...

* ...and thereby hangs another rabbit hole - before reading up on "flat irons", I had no idea of the (actual) existence of the 'Haslar Gunboat Yard' in Gosport! This comprised gunboat sheds and maintenance workshops, and was designed in 1856 by William Scamp of the Admiralty Works Department for the housing and repair of British gunboats, and with a design capacity to hold approx. 50 of these boats at a time! 

But thereby hangs another tale, and another rabbit hole, for another day..   and that's more than enough "anothers"

Patent Heaving-Up Slips' at Haslar Gunboat Yard (from Mechanics' Magazine, 3 January, 1857)

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 Safe to say I was soundly, and comprehensively, drubbed...  😂  AI is now 5 to 3 up...

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 Laters, as the young people are want to say...