New Osprey on the Slipway

Messrs D'Amato and Rava have apparently constructed a new  vessel.

Osprey Imperial Roman Warships 
 will hit the water in January.

Battle 2

The Peloponesians chose to remain in place and reduce their quality disadvantage.
The central squadron are in LINE but the right is held by two squadrons en echelon which prevents a diekplous from their attackers.
The commander's squadron lurks on the left flank hoping to move across and take some attackers in the flank.

 The centre Peloponesians are charged by their opposite numbers who attempt a diekplous. This works easily due to the quality and speed superiority the Athenians enjoy. A massacre sets the Peloponesians to flight in a single combat round. I should have had them close-up their line, maybe then they would have lasted longer.

Athenians charge the P centre

Athenians have got behind the Ps and sink four in the first contact.

The Ps routed by the As for no loss

 The Peloponesian commander comes out to threaten the Athenian flank but is immediately charged. This time the Athenians opt for a head-on clash and a  hard-fought melee ensues. Despite the Athenian commander getting sunk, the Peloponesians are routed.

A blue acetate slip means sunk. A card slip means crippled. Ships off a base are out of command.


The two Peloponesian squadrons on the right divide. The front one takse up a single line in CLOSE ORDER after the devastation of a potential diekplous is appreciated, and are charged by the Athenians. This melee is a tough one but the outcome results in an inevitable Peloponesian rout.

 The rear one faces left and tries to take the Athenians who had been successful in the centre in the flank as they are now disordered.

 After a successful initial round of combat the Peloponesians lose the disordered melee due to their poorer ratings.

 The Peloponesian commander puts up a spirited fight and even sinks the squadron commander opposing him but his unit's rout completes the Peloponesian debacle.

Lessons

The diekplous works as a deadly tactic if it works. Weaker sides need to really do anything to avoid it if they can. Closing order and deeper formations can extend the combat against more able opponents.

Having tried complex game turns, this scale needs a form of IgoUgo. It seemed to work ok,

Seventy ships fought for 7 rounds to achieve a result. 22 Peloponesians were sunk. 5 Athenians sank. 4 Athenians were cripled and 8 Peloponesians. 17 Peloponesians ran for cover.

Tiny Triereis take to the seas again

 

Time to dust-off the Outpost triereis and work on the big battle rules again.  

3 Athenian squadrons approach the entrance to the Crooked Straits, 4 Peloponnesian squadrons hope to keep them from getting through to break a blockade of an Athenian fort not far down the straits.

 

 The Athenians advance in line ahead. Squadron commanders shown by pennants.

 

  The Peloponnesians wait mostly in line, A patch of 'bad water' gives an eerie effect from the rising sun (flash). I am stil ambivalent about the use of models at this scale. It is the only way to do large battles but moving away from monitoring individual ships loses something from the appeal of galley combat maybe. The card ships are still my priority.


The ground scale is 1 to 1 with the ships. This means each base is about 1 stadion or 190metres on its long side. All ships are triereis but have differing characteristics according to build, crew quality, command quality and the nature of the squadron leader.

The Hole Truth

The ancient trieres had several enemies. It could not stand storm weather without being flung on rocks or capsized: witness the many examples of wrecked fleets. It sprang readily apart if it was rammed by a one of its peers. Fire would quickly rip through a timber ship well basted in tar and pitch. A walk on the beach the other day reminded me of the real nemesis of the trieres, shipworms.

Fish trap palings riddled with Teredinidae borings. Baltic Sea

Shipworms are not worms at all, but molluscs.

 

 They (Teredinidae) are perfectly adapted to their lifestyle of living on bored wood, which they live within as adults, that their shells are reduced to a small but  effective drill-bit and their body is elongate and worm-like.

The calcareous liniung of the boring is seen here.Baltic Sea

The larvae swim free and setttle on submerged wood before boring into it and spending the rest of their lives excavating tunnels within it.

One valve of Teredo navalis and a close-up of the teeth which wreak the damage.

There are many references to the practice of  drawing triereis up onto a beach or into a ship shed. This is often explained as being in order to dry a hull out and give a ship extra speed.

Ship sheds as excavated at Zea harbour, Piræus, Athens.

More likely, the aim was to kill Teredinidae larvae and keep established populations under control. Because the established worms live entirely within the wood it is too late for a ship by the time signs of infestation are visible. The main strategy was to prolong ship life by making life tough for the little bastards. The British Navy resorted at great expense to putting copper bottoms on its ships in the eighteenth century. A huge expense but one which they could afford and which gave them an advantage over all other navies. The Kyrenia freighter wreck from 4th century b.c was sheathed in lead but a galley relying on speed could not adopt this strategy.

Infested timber from Olympias

Trieres hull construction

An infestation could be made good by replacing planks. This was done to Olympias after a period of poor maintenance allowed Teredinidae to take hold. The open end-grain of dowels used to hold the thousands tennons in place were ideal entry points for Teredinidae lavae.







It has been argued that poor ship performance by the Persian fleet which had been in the water for a long time before the combat may have been due to weakening and waterglogging due to Teredinidae infestation. The Athenian fleet at Syracuse would almost certainly have been degraded over the time it spent inactive mainly due to Teredinidae damage. Crews who recognised the problem refusing to risk going out in the riddled hulks.

This pale started as a 25cm solid trunk but its volume and strength must be reduced by at least half. Baltic Sea.

No wonder the great expense of the harbour facilities at Zea and other triereis ports were outlayed.

Piræus - a refuge from ship worms

Salamis : the long view

Not only does he have a long name, but Buckner F. Melton Jr. likes to make a long podcast. The medium suits shorter pieces, I feel. However, if you like a background for painting or modelling his pieces are ideal.

 NHP Episode 4: The Greco-Persian War and the Battle of Salamis

The one on Salamis is a bit lopsided because the battle comprises a short segement among 2 1/2 hours. (at about 2 hrs ) .Mr Melton's southern drawl massacres Greek pronounciation as mercilessly as the Greeks massacred the Persian ships. The odd style of mainly discussing the historical story using the future tense is also a bit hard on the ear. Maybe a shorter piece would not have made these aspects grate on me so much ?  But a site giving podcasts on ancient galley warfare is a GOOD THING and one must applaud Buckner's dedication in producing hours of material to paint by.

With reference to his account of the battle, it is rather imprecise and incomplete in contrast to his close following of Herodotos through the background story. There is nothing original but he covers most ancient sources. He favours the East-West scenario with ships filling the strait many ranks deep and makes an analogy with Agincourt. There is so much that has been written since JFC Fuller who is cited here that it should whet your appetite to read more for more detail.

Greeks are left blobs, Persians the right.

 I am now lining up a few jobs to do as I listen to the other Bucknercasts.

When Athens got 5s

The Zea Harbour Project ( Danish Institute at Athens ) is an interesting ongoing project.

Recent excavations have found open slipways suitable for 5s to be hauled up on.

 

They date to  320s bc presumably and make a nice contribution to knowledge of the later Athenian navy. Maybe open slipways indicate the sheds inside the harbour were still used for 3s or 4s?

Video of the project in a nutshell.

Anyone else see the Angus McBride connection within the website?

SHOCK AND OAR : Part III

 

One of the failings of much writing about galley warfare, and especially trieres combat, in the past has been to focus on the act of ramming only from the point of view of the target.


I have scribbled about rams and the effects on the target. What I would also like to get across is the fact that a ramming attack is a double-edged event. To put into perspective, to the other lunatics like me and maybe some half -interested others, how the full picture of what was going on in this type of combat was more complex, more uncertain. more frightening and more skillfull than is generally appreciated.

Dare you take to sea for battle in a trieres ?

Trieres combat, and galley combat in general, required the cooperative efforts of 200 or more  men to put to use the near-perfected product of thousands of hours of skilled work by experienced craftsmen. The whole project could be wrecked by poor management, a moment's error of judgement or the vagaries of nature. In the Second World War many thousands of tank crew took imperfect vehicles into combat and found the harsh realities of cooperation under restricted conditions while under threat of death an almost intolerable physical and psychological challenge.  A few moments could bring a shift between the vehicle and its crew being victorious and elated at destroying and damaging other vehicles and into a state of abject fear and trepidation as the enemy turned the tables on them. A lot of technology and training could be put in danger by a ditch beside the road, a poor electrical connection or if the team in the other tin can had a smidgin more luck or skill.

In the back of each crewman's mind....

Newton's Third Law was first defined and written down by him but many people had prior awareness of it. The crew of a trieres in particular. If a ram is accelerated into a target then the attacking ship will also feel some repercussions. Newton's First Law was felt by the oarsmen in their legs and arms as they accelerated the ship towards the target. Newton's Second law was appreciated by the kybernetes in his calculation of how much speed he could coax from his crew and how fast they could accelerate and how much momentum he would need to damage his target.

The Third Law means that the momentum of the attacker will come back to bite him if he slams his trieres into a target without regard to this relationship. It is one thing to shoot a stone ball into the wall of a town with as much force as one can generate from a katapeltes and quite another to treat a mass of wood populated by 200 men in the same way.

A trieres hitting an imoveable target will almost instantly decelerate to a stop.  The trieres is subjected to an opposite force which stops it dead. The crew also experience this opposite force, which also stops them dead- maybe literally. This is the same deceleration which affects the unfortunates in a car crash. This is what trieres combat with rams is about. A series of car crashes.: but car crashes which are executed deliberately and in a controlled manner.

The trieres in a car crash has two problems to overcome.

The first is that the structure of the ship should survive the impact. If it does not then the crew is lost anyway and even if the target is eliminated then they have gained no advantage for their side.

The second is that the crew should survive the impact. The crew must be able to continue the fight after damaging a target ship otherwise their effort gains no advantage for their side.

THE SHIP

A trieres had two systems which contributed to its survival in a collision.

The ram itself was mounted at the front of the vessel as an extension of the keel and supported by the stem post. The centre of mass of the ship is projected forward very closely to the driving centre of the ram which means their is little turning moment to stress the structure. The ram mounting is solid and braced to resist being deviated from a forward course as it impacts the target. The ram itself is of massive bronze and formed like a modern girder. It is harder and stonger than any wood it impacts. The whole structure of the ship is mounted onto the keel and this forms the axis of attack as it bears the whole mass of the ship into the target. Because the ship is built to withstand the force of the sea resisting its progress then it is well suited to surviving an impact along that same axis. It is not coincidence that the ram as a weapon developed out of the cutwater as a hydrodynamic structure. Trieres must have been built to withstand the expected stresses of combat impacts.

 In addition, the ship's crew were not passive passengers but riders who could act to help achieve an effective impact. The rowers could obey commands to accelerate or decelerate and the kybernetes could steer the ship into the target at an angle of attack of his choosing. A good kybernetes could judge, given an appreciation of the relative courses of his own ship and the target, the correct angle of impact to achieve a hole in the enemy's vessel.

THE CREW
The crew were well aware of the implications of the meeting, no matter how controlled, Flying oar looms and tight spaces under the deck left little scope for avoiding at least a sore head from an unexpected collision.

Brace,brace,brace : one possible method after Wegener-Sleeswyk

 The deck officers must have communicated the moment of expected impact to the keleustes and on to the oarsmen. The oars must be out of the water at the moment of impact and the men braced on the beams and benches around them to take the strain.  The stresses he would experience are about 1.5G which amounts to a man of 75kg being slammed in the front by 113kg or so. It gets worse. If the target is more massive than the rammer then deceleration is more sudden and the impact rises to a maximum of 2G. This means each rower must brace himself as if being slammed by 150kg or approximately 3 medium sized lambs or two unarmoured dwarves.

Multiplied by 2 !

 EXECUTING THE ATTACK : DON'TS

If the ram was slammed into the enemy ship at a wildly oblique angle then the lateral forces experienced by the ram mounting could shatter the structure and tear it off. This we know happened on a large scale in early ramming battles. Experience was gained and applied in future tactics.

If the approach to ram was conducted at too-acute an angle then it may either not bite, experiencing a greater resistance from the hull than if it was attacked obliquely, or the speed of a target pursued may be so great that the net ramming speed is insufficent to damage the target.

The combined impact velocity of the attacker and target must be kept in a range sufficient to breach the target's hull but insufficient to damage the attacker. This is why the best way to attack another ship was from the stern quarter.

Gets it right the second time ! A perfect anastrophe.

The worst way to attack another ship was on the bow quarter. In this configuration each vessel will experience a force equal to the sum of their momenta. A trieres built to sail at 15 knots and be rowed at 10 will be severely tried, to say the least, by a head-on impact at equivalent to 20 knots.

It was only marginally less bad to attack a target from the beam if the target was moving. If the target is crossing then the lateral stress on the bow timbers was at its maximum and this was the weakest aspect of its structure. In addition, the forces affecting the crew of the attacker would be severe. They would be thrown forwards by the deceleration of the impact AND to the side opposite to that to which the target was moving. Heaven help any on deck who did not have a good hand-hold in that situation.

And what of the human sardines squished amongst sweat, farts, bilge and curses into this high-speed wooden can and expected to hurtle themselves at an unseen foe? What happens to them on impact ?

So much seems to hinge upon the kybernetes that we can only increase our admiration for these men. They were not of sufficient social status to warrant more than a few cursory lines from ancient authors but it was their skill and judgement derived from years of experience which was the key to a successful ramming attack.

The kybernetes must control the speed of his vessel. He must control the angle of attack and he must judge the timing to perfection with his ship moving in three planes on the sea.

The poet Lucian wrote about the pilot of a giant grain freighter, The Isis, he visited in Athens harbour in AD. This was about a sailing ship of great size but a sneaking admiration is to be detected in this terse and outwardly disrespectful description of an unassuming kybernetes who must have nevertheless exuded a sense of great  skill and confidence.

'Samippus: And all depends for its safety on one little old atomy of a man, who controls that great rudder with a mere broomstick of a tiller! He was pointed out to me; Heron was his name, I think; a woolly-pated fellow, half-bald. 
Timolaus:  He is a wonderful hand at it, so the crew say; a very Proteus in sea-cunning.'
(Lucian - The Ship. 35)



EXECUTING THE ATTACK : DOS

Once the ram became de rigeur for sea battles, mariners must have rapidly gained knowledge of how to use it to best effect by reports spread of various trials and errors. Herodotos tells us that the Phoceans learnt an early lesson in his account of the battle of Alalia in 535bc. They won, but many of their ships were almost as wrecked as their targets, the bows being ruined by the impact forces.
By the time we have good evidence for the structure of warships we can see all the longitudinal timbers meet behind the ram so that all impact forces are distributed along the whole ship and focussed through the bronze tip of the ship.

To hit an enemy effectively only required a small advantage in speed to give the required excess force to penetrate the tenon-and-peg hulls of triereis. Computer simulation has established that  different types of wood in the target or different angles of approach do not significantly change the basic rule which is that an advantage of 1/2 knot in speed will mean a penetrating hit.

On the other hand this means that vastly excessive speed will send the attacker barrelling in to the target and as the breach widens and the attacker slows he is more likely to get wedged-in and unable to withdraw. In this classic situation the crew of the ruined ship will launch a frantic boarding attempt, seeking for survival aboard the (more) bouyant victor.

The same excessive speed will tumble deck passengers into the briney and injure some rowers.

Shock and Oars !

This means that lightness of touch was a required attribute of a successful warship commander. The cooperation between the deck officers to feed information to the poop deck and the cooperation - almost empathy - required between the kybernetes, pentekontarchos and trierarch could only be developed by intensive practice. Just when sufficient speed had been achieved, just where the best angle of attack lay to ensure a hit and space to back-off, and the exact moment at which to stop rowing and brace for impact should all be judged and broadcast to ensure an attack was delivered.

The best position for an attack was to sit on the tail of the target as per an aerial dogfight.
In this position the target's speed is obvious, any change of course he makes is signalled by movements of his pedalia. By the same token, the target cannot read the attacker's changes in course and speed until after a disadvantageous delay.

 

The other significant advantage of the tailing position is that when the ram is set at the target it will hit a receeding target at an acute angle which minimises the stresses on the attacker. Transverse stress were the worst in terms of damaging a ship's bows and converging course would give increased shock of impact.

In trieres combat the secret was to ram the enemy in the right place, from the right position of attack, and with just enough force necessary to do the job.

In later times, as larger ships appeared, one could count  more on the mass of ones' own vessel to survive impact especially against smaller vessels. The trieres was a Formula One vehicle rather than a Stock Car and had to be treated as such.