Thank you everyone who has replied. It is heartening to see that so many have. I worried that I was the only one interested in this battle.
It is particularly good to hear from people who can read Italian and German: I suspect that there is a lot that can be found in those languages that is not readily available in English.
Ironclads in Action is one of my favourite books. I think it still gives the best summary of the battle, even tho it was published over a century ago.
The 1:1200 game on Lissa / Viz (and presumably also a tour of the forts?) sounds fantastic. Hope to see battle reports posted. A 1:600 scale bash would be even more spectacular. Ships at that scale must have taken some collecting.
Have to say, the more I read about this battle the more sympathy I have for Persano. He was unlucky to come up against one of the greatest admirals of all time – a man who had somehow instinctively grasped the essence of ironclad warfare. He was leading a navy that had only recently been unified and was in many ways still divided. Also, his mistakes are very much those that a wargamer would make. Who hasn't been desperate to get a brand-new, varnish-not-quite-dried, supership into action?
My thought would be to start the battle with the gap in the Italian line caused by Persano switching flagships already there – with hindsight to help us it is not a mistake players are likely to make. If the rules you are using make allowance for shifting flags, that should reproduce some of the problems of command the Italians subsequently had. I am not sure how the lack of interest some of his juniors had in supporting Persano should be reproduced, beyond leaving-out the Italian wooden ships. It could be a dull game for a squadron commander if scenario-specific rules discourage him from getting into the fight. Beyond that, grading at least the bulk of the Austrians as able or elite and of the Italians as green would go a long way towards making a historical result more likely.
The battle is a good test for rules, especially for gunnery rules. We tried a half-size, free deployment free-for-all with my rules and found that the guns were a little too good, tho it was not far out.
One of the things I want to learn more about is the nature of the guns. Particularly, how heavy and long the smoothbores were.
One immediate question. The only turning circle I can find for the Habsburg is 1360 yards, given by Lord Brassey in the 1886 edition of his Naval Annual. The correlation between ship length and the size of a turning circle in this period is fuzzy, but that circle is quite a bit larger than that of other ships of her size. In our game the Habsburg suffered a rudder hit and barely noticed it! Also it is much larger than the 563 yards Brassey gives her sister, the Ferdinand Max. In these early days small differences between sisters and maybe experimental ideas that did not work meant that sister ships might differ in their turning performance, but that is a big difference. I suspect that the 1360 yards might be misprint, but am reluctant to ignore the only solid thing I can find about the Habsburg's turning ability.
So does anyone have an alternative figure for the Habsburg's turning circle? Has anyone come across an account saying that she was unusually cumbersome?
