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War_Hymn t1_jclq3ax wrote

Reply to comment by Archmagnance1 in Grad Student Explores Ancient Warfare With Naval Ram Project by kratos2025

>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.

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Archmagnance1 t1_jcltzby wrote

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.

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War_Hymn t1_jcm07wy wrote

>I don't imagine ships, when rammers were common, were completely helpless and would go completely underwater if they got rammed once.

Yeah, but kind of hard to fight and maneuver if your rowing section is submerged in water. And I imagine a 1-2 foot wide hole in a 40-50 tonnes vessel won't take too long to reach that point.

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Archmagnance1 t1_jcpo1s6 wrote

I said it somewhere else but I imagine it was more to throw a fair portion of the crew into panic while it's being boarded. After a (hopefully) successful boarding the new owners beach it and after the battle they can patch it up.

Sinking ships as the primary goal is relatively new for the past 130 years or so with the advent of widely available explosive munitions and engagement ranges measured in the kilometers. Even with the powerful guns of the age of sail they still fought at ranges of 400m or less because they didn't have what came to he called fire directors or fire control systems.

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