"About the Victorian Armored Vehicles " Topic

I always love them but…I have a question… what if they really existed at the time of the ACW… they would change any of that war or they would have been easily destroyed by artillery?

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Amicalement
Armand

I would think the issue would be primarily one of mobility. I have a hard d time seeing a land ironclad making much progress at Shiloh or Chickaumagua.

What about attacking cities like Atlanta?

Amicalement
Armand

I agree with Rich. While possibly not full trench warfare as in WWI…many of the ACW battlefields have rather difficult terrain features. Even if the artillery of the time can not pen the armor, getting hung up on the battlefield grants the infantry an advantage. Limited fire arc and no mobility---just light a fire underneath

I see a more limited used of them as defensive pill boxes/mobile pill boxes rather than offensive land ships.

I haven't seen any I thought of as practical. Many are fun looking, though. Good for games, but that's about it.

Might have been more use as part of punitive columns out in the various colonies of the various empires.

it's not such a leap from this :

to the kind of vehicles in Tango01's original post.

I would actually say that in siege warfare they might have seen effective service. Although they would have been even slower than the WW1 tanks a couple of cannon and musket ball proof machines would have been very useful at Petersburg. If they could have functioned as the end of a sap, as a shield with a heavy gun, even if they moved a few miles in a day they would have been faster than the usual hand dug sap

The engine power/weight ratio hadn't been solved by WWI, so it is tough to see it being solved in the 1860s. Even under perfect conditions, they would have been too slow to survive artillery fire.

Being incredibly slow moving, unless they had some form of rapid firing guns with arcs to cover pretty well 360°, they would have been sitting ducks for the infantry. Land-based artillery batteries were fairly effective against river gunboats, so I doubt they would have had much trouble pounding these things to pieces.

The Powerplant issue would be the real problem. They might be good for siege warfare but it seems to me that they would be too slow and unreliable

There was a reason after all that trains moved on tracks and steam ships on water.

With a siege machine you can do a lot of things. You can lay track ahead of it in a trench and move it on those. You can use a long armored pipe and have the boilers behind it and save that weight. You could use a fireless boiler if the missions would be short duration at the end of a siege and the machine is only used in the final assault. Also you could use a double unit where the front end is the fighting end and there is a much more massive power unit behind it, being pushed forward by the power unit.

Again as a siege engine the machine doesn't have to cross bridges and if its digging its own trench, or pushing forward a shield that protects sappers it will be moving on smoothed out ground, and possibly tracks.

In the HQC Universe we postulate some pre improvement in the steam engines before 1850, but steam siege machines are used against the Russians in the Crimean and against the South at Richmond and Charleston.

How about something like this? A lightly armored gatling gun carrier used as close infantry support?

How many are available? One? A hundred? I think their impact would depend on their availability.

I would think that the differences between the Union and Confederate abilities to build sea-going ironclads would be the same for land ironclads.

The Confederates never were able to build sufficiently powerful engines and instead depended on engines taken from wooden steamers. Thus their ironclads were slow and broke down a lot. And the Confederacy didn't have the industry to build many ironclads in any case.

So, to get to the theoretical question: the Union would have built more, better and more dependable land ironclads than the Confederates, leading to an even more severe drubbing than the actual War.

Gatling Tricycles would have been more practically effective than very slow-moving siege tanks, I think.

I rather like Chris Palmer's take on this; like the riverine warfare in the west, he turned to timberclads.

Thick but relatively light timbers might be good at stopping small arms. Sort of motorized mantlets.

Nothing I'd want to point towards artillery…

Doug

Well both sides in the ACW used mobile artillery on land. Google "Dry Land Merrimac" or "Rail Road Monitor" as examples.
It would not take too much VSF handwavium to say that they had self-contained motive power and caterpillar tracks.
So for VSF games, there is no reason not to use them and see how thing turn out.

Not sure, in Dr. William R. Forstchen's 'Lost Regiment' he goes with wheeled AFVs. As he has a PHD in history with an emphasis in military history, ACW, and the history of technology, I have always felt he had the background to project the technology.

After all, Steam Traction Engines were developed for farm use in 1855 and were actually made more popular by the manpower shortages of the ACW. The British army ordered them as artillery tractors and the Russian army tested and purchased one in the 1870s.

As to speed, Britain reduced the speed limit for steam engines on roads in 1865 from 10 mph to 4…

Of course in Forstchen's 'Lost Regiment' series the tech is necessary to offset the enemies' numerical advantage. In the ACW the resources went to actual weapon production starving the then developing steam technology. Without an immediate return on investment the Union military wasn't interested in much of anything new and the South didn't have the resources to play with.

P.S. I still agree with Forstchen's concept that the AFVs would have been wheeled – tracks didn't arrive on the scene until 1904.

P.P.S. Add Forstchen's turret mounted steam powered Gatlings to those AFVs to suppress the artillery…

Historically adding power to the Gatlings was an fairly early idea. Dr. Gatling used an electric motor to drive an M1893 and achieved a rate of fire of 1500 rpm.

Depending upon when the technology started to change there is a lot of scope for improved land vehicles. There were steam road engines capable of over 20 mph long before 1850. They were legislated out of existence by entrenched economic interested (the toll roads) in the UK. If this had gone a different route the technology would have had at least twenty years of development by the American Civil War. This is part of the canon of the Hive, Queen and Country Universe

But … if we talk abot a battle in the open field … with only six of Those machines in the center of your line … you can act on the flanks comfortably … how your enemy is going to "break" your center against those tanks.!

In this case (fixed the center) the speed would not be important.

Amicalement
Armand

Also for siege work, a group of four to six would be enough to force most fortified places. In the HQC altered American Civil War a very small number of these allow the Union to take Petersburg and are then moved to the last bastion of the South, Charleston.

So, they can made a big difference.

From both sides?. Or only from the Union side?

Amicalement
Armand

Unless the Confederate land ironclad wins the war almost immediately, before the Union can out produce them many times over there is almost no chance such advances in technology will help the South. It will be exactly like the waterborne ironclads. The Rebels build CSS Virginia and the Union builds Monitor, Galena and New Ironsides. The Confederates start building a number of other casemate ironclads and the Union builds several classes of monitors. The Rebels build a handful of ironclads on the Mississippi and the Union has the City Class, Benton, the two turret monitors and the list goes on and on. Not only do the Union shipyards produce more hulls but they are mechanically far more reliable. They are also far more likely to actually see service. The Rebel machines were very likely to be destroyed on the stocks to prevent their capture by the advancing Union.

With land ironclads it would be the same issues. So long as that idiot General Ripley can be side stepped.

Land ironclads are a lot more likely to see the front line because many major industrial centres stayed under CSA control a lot later, where major ports fell. Richmond, Atlanta, and Selma are (in our handwavium-based universe) producing land ironclads regularly, though nowhere near to the level of USA production.

Which would mean, one suspects, they'd end up as siege defence units and as crack Imperial Guard units with the ANV and the AoT (though the AoT probably loses theirs in their successful but bloody attack at Franklin and so is still cut up at Nashville).

Agree.

Still an interesting "what if" wargame with them! (smile)

Amicalement
Armand

As soon as New Orleans was lost to the South, the end would be the same and the wonder weapons would only delay any different result.
IF they got to the right place at the right time. Otherwise they would be a drain on a small industry and possibly speed the demise of the South. The same as '44-'45.