Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Ironclad warship/Archive1

The following discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.

[edit] Ironclad warship

I think this is now pretty thorough and almost-comprehensively verifiable. I think it's at or very nearly at A-class status, and reviews always produce useful suggestions about improving the article.... The Land 19:27, 10 June 2007 (UTC)

• Oppose - this article is definetly very good, but I don't think that it's there yet. Some suggestions to develop the article are:

• The wording could be tighter. For instance "by the 1890s it had become difficult to design a major warship which lacked metal armor" is confusing as there was no technical reason for this (eg, it was still perfectly feasible to build wooden warships). Rather, changes in military technology meant that warships had to be armoured to be effective.
• The article needs a bit of tidying up. For instance, ship names should always be put in italics and there are a few instances of wiki-linked words not being seperated from the preceeding word.
• The second half of the article has a number of assertions which, while correct, probably need citations (for instance "No navy really got to grips with the tactical consequences of the new ships and new weaponry")

Agree with both of these, will get onto them this evening. The Land 07:16, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

• I think that the section on the first ironclad battles should be moved from the start of the article to come after the discussion of what an ironclad was and who used them. --Nick Dowling 00:03, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Could do, but the 1860s battles are important background for the technical development sections. Perhaps I can move the 'what they were and how they were used' material from the end to before the 'first ironclad battles' section'.The Land 07:16, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

• Comment. I think there's a lot of good information in the article, but I agree that the outline of the article should be different. I think the article should open with a definition and background section. After that, it seems to be difficult to separate the operational history from the development and tactics sections, because they're directly related to each other. Perhaps you could label the overall section as "Development and use" and then sub-divide it into "early ironclads," "first battles," "technological developments", "new designs" "late 20th century battles," etc. or something like that. In that way you could explain both the technologicial development and operational use of the ironclads at the same time so that the article would flow in a linear fashion. The final section could be "end of the ironclad." The article also needs more inline citations. CLA 02:42, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

The structure of this article is always going to be tricky, because the technical development and the operational use of the ironclads are so intertwined. The article had the structure you describe a while back, but IMO it didn't really work. There are no significant engagements between 1866 and 1894, so the only continuous thread between those dates is the technical side of things: what's more it is a continuum, there are no clear 'generational' divides until the 1890s. It also makes little sense to me to put marginally-important uses of the ironclad (Guerra del Pacifico, boshin War, etc) alongside the vital ones (Hampton Roads and Lissa) purely on a chronological basis. The Land 07:16, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Okay, well, let me know here if more inline citations have been added and I'll relook it. CLA 13:07, 12 June 2007 (UTC)

• - The ironclad age began with the gloire? Well, we don't have to count ancient Korean turtle boats, but surely the attempts at Sevastopol in 1855 were the start? They were the ones which proved the effectiveness of metal armor against shore guns (particularly compared to wooden ships). Ironclads didn't have to be ocean-going to be effective. Then you had the monitor/merrimack, but ironclads of course were already being built in europe before then, and by the battle of lissa it seems that people realized wooden ships could no longer be effective against ironclads. At least, not unless you had some luck.

SpookyMulder 09:40, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

Sondhaus says "Gloire". Hill says "floating batteries". I'm with Sondhaus, though the article as stands does acknowledge the claim of the floating batteries. The Land 10:01, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

After further cogitation, I think what the article needs to convey is that pre-Gloire a wooden battlefleet supplemented by a few ironclad gunboats was a viable option and could have remained so; post-Gloire, it was inevitable that navies would convert their battlefleets to armoured ships. I think that's what's meant by 'ironclad age'. The Land 17:56, 11 June 2007 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page, such as the current discussion page. No further edits should be made to this page.