And it still took a lot of holes and time to actually sink a ship because, shockingly, they are designed to not sink. I don't imagine ships, when rammers were common, were completely helpless and would go completely underwater if they got rammed once.

They were beached at night because they would get waterlogged if left for too long, so a ram might have been to take a ship out of a fight or to take people away from counterboarding to deal with it. Again, not sinking. Its possible given enough time but I personally don't think it was the intention. However, we don't know for sure.

A ship becoming unstable doesn't mean it sinks, or that it will sink fast enough for it to matter for the outcome of a skirmish or engagement.

Exactly, it’s less a ram in and of itself and more like a naval version of a drawbridge or siege tower. The Romans knew they were ass at naval warfare as they didn’t really have any sort of maritime tradition compared to the Carthaginians or the various Greek polities. In that classic pragmatic Roman way they just went “well we’re bad sailors but really good soldiers, can we make naval combat more like land combat?”.

There’s two main overarching themes there, with regards to Rome. The first is that Rome has a tendency to get involved in a war, get their asses handed to them, and then reevaluate and come back even stronger. It’s a pretty unique feature of the Roman state in this period, the ability to suffer a major reverse and keep plugging along. It’s doubtful that any of their peers could take an L as bad as Cannae and almost immediately field another army. Secondly, the Roman Navy (called the Classis) was a massive afterthought throughout the Roman Republic and into the Imperial period. Service in the navy was something to be avoided at all costs, and didn’t bring nearly as much glory and honor to a Roman man as service in the Legions.

God, I must have been three or four. My grandfather was a commercial fisherman in New Jersey, my family has always been pretty nautical. I grew up on and around boats.

Where did you hear that? They used grappling hooks to pull and tethered ships. Its not like Age of Sail ships used a corvus device, but boarding was still common.

>Ships can float with water in them

Wooden boats and ships, yes - if they're empty or lightly ballasted. Most merchant ships of that era will normally have up to 1/4 of their displacement in dense, non-floating stone ballast for stability. Add weight of crew and dense cargo, etc. most wooden hull vessels will sink with a hole below the waterline if nothing was done. Lightly ballasted ships like Greek triremes would be flooded to at least the upper deck.

Ships during the Age of Sail were even worst since you had up to a hundred tonnes of dense metal ordnance and ammunition on something like a double-decker frigate. And because some guns might be mounted on the upper portion of the ship, you need proportionally more ballast to keep the ship stable. Something like the 32-gun French Hermione that displaced 1200 tonnes had about 200 tonnes of iron and granite rock ballast in addition to her ~50-70 tonnes of guns and round-shot ammunition.

It also seems like (if it truly was cast from solid bronze) these would be incredibly expensive, and fiendishly difficult to recover if they did fall off in the water. I assume that budgeting has been a perpetual concern for governments and militaries, so it would seem the goal would be to hang on to them as much as possible.

I would also like to know the answer to this.

This is fascinating stuff. So it looks like the Corvus is pretty different from these naval rams in that it’s less like an axe head and more like a hook you can march a battalion across.

I just ordered that book! I didn't even consider reading it to my kid as a bedtime story, that's genius. Do you remember what age you were when he started reading it to you?

Idea was to break a hole under the waterline. Barring that they tried to shear the oars off the other ship by swiping their side.

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What game in your view has the best naval combat?

Ensure the wood is dry, get a tight fit and then launch the ship. Give it a week or so and wood will swell and the metal bits might as well be welded onto the wood.

For extra fun maybe wrap a rope around it. Looking at the bits that are left over I’m not sure it’s much of a mystery. Wouldn’t be 100% certain but those 4 open bits seem to be the mortises for the wood to fit in.

Edit: saw other pictures below, looks like there’s a mortise in the other side, same deal just my 4 open bits comment is wrong.

"Break as many planks as possible all at once".

Not to riff on this too much, but the design is quite elegant. It is the prow of a warship, so it cuts through the water cleanly, presenting thin lines that the water slides by. But when faced with a solid object like a ship, it acts as a solid rectangle. It hits with all the weight of the ship as a hammer or mallet, not as a spike, designed to shatter but not to penetrate. And back in the day, ships would be more likely held together with mortise and tenon, not nails, and be vulnerable to being snapped. The target would be swamped in just a few minutes from multiple small leaks and become unmaneuverable, knocked completely out of action.

You’re welcome! Naval warfare has always been fascinating to me, I blame my dad for reading me Master and Commander as a bedtime story when I was a kid.

Bonk (thanks dude)

Great response! Thanks.

I like your continued use of the word bonk, btw.

I don't think I've heard of ram project for a few years now, good to see it's ongoing

Thanks. Also, the shape of the ram (3 wide flat bars rather than a pointed beak) highlight the goal of preventing it from going too deeply into the target.

From the Nat Geo special I saw on youtube, pretty accurate

Chicken and egg problem. We don't know how it was attached so we don't know how it was used. We don't know how it was used so we don't know how it was attached.

At least, this is my understanding. Things might have changed since I last looked into it or what I read might have been out of date or flat out wrong.

We do know boarding was quite common for a very long time so I've been of the opinion for a while it was to aid in shock while boarding.

It sorta depends. While the idea of putting a ram on a ship and just going “bonk” is pretty intuitive, there’s some nuance to it.

Ancient vessels got quite large, and could have crews numbering in the hundreds depending on size and the number of oars. Some larger vessels would such as a quinquereme would likely be able to withstand more than one bonk, which might be catastrophic to a smaller bireme or trireme. By necessity the oarsmen were close to or under the waterline, and as such were rather vulnerable. A breach caused by a ram could flood the lower levels of a galley and force the oarsmen to either abandon their post or drown. It’s similar to a mobility kill in armored warfare, where you knock a tread or a wheel off of a vehicle. Galleys are unusual in the sense that as long as the seas are calm they’re very maneuverable, and if the first bonk was insufficient an experienced crew would be able to reverse and bonk once again.

Most galleys carried a contingent of what we would now call Marines, either to defend the ship in case it got stuck or to attack the crew of the ship it was stuck to. The Romans famously committed themselves to this during the first Punic War. Inexperienced with naval warfare but possessing phenomenal heavy infantry, they used a device called a Corvus to turn naval engagements into infantry engagements.

Fire was another ancient favorite, for obvious reasons, but could be a high risk endeavor. A burning ship could ignite anything nearby, and weapons such as fire ships were almost totally at the mercy of the wind.

Large fleet engagements could also turn into pseudo-land battles, as galleys rammed each other and became interlocked. Crews would fight hand to hand deck to deck, with a very real danger of the ship they were standing in sinking or burning down as the battle progressed.

Of course we don’t know a whole lot about ancient naval warfare, as the article states, and what we do know is the source of serious contention between archeologists and classicists. There are however decent records regarding galley combat from the late medieval and early modern periods, with the arguable high point being the colossal Battle of Lepanto in 1571, but galleys continued to be used as warships as late as the early 19th century, where they squared off (and lost pretty badly) to American and Swedish warships during the Barbary War. I got a little carried away, but I hope this answered some of your questions!

Boarding wasn't as common for most navies until the Roman navy with the corvus. So I would say it's not an aide