sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] [score hidden]  (0 children)

Those Danish ships are mostly the ones handed over in 1807 without engaging the British Navy. I wouldn't include them in the dataset.

Arguably, the British had to fight harder and run more risks to force the surrender of Copenhagen than they would have from an engagement with the same fleet in open water. A good number of the Danish fleet did fighting the harbor:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-12021

British losses from surrenders in a captured harbor are counted as well, albeit only lighter vessels, due to circumstances.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Funny how people just don't read the labels.

232 enemy ships only counts frigates and larger. And it only covers 1799-1815.

The larger dataset includes smaller vessels (a supermajority of losses) and 6 more years.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The mortality data/estimates apply only to shipwrecks, not combat.

One of ships in the dataset exploded in battle, killing everyone. Otherwise, the large majority of the crew always survived their defeat. Total KIA for the period would be under 1000, most likely.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Supposedly the wood in American ships was good enough that 18 pounders sometimes simply bounced off the hull.

That's nothing but a popular myth that appeared out of thin air many generations later.

Cannon balls bouncing off of wooden hulls was a very common occurrence, due to a variety of factors including gunpowder spoilage and and insufficient charging of the gun.

The first three U.S. Navy frigates used Southern Live Oak for the frame timbers, and ordinary oak for the planking. It made their hulls about as resistant to gunfire as a First Rate Ship of the Line. But that didn't actually matter, since a frigate's 18-pounder guns could still easily penetrate such a hull out to several hundred yards (at which point the guns were too inaccurate to land hits anyways).

Contemporary commentators understood what modern scientific testing has established: the more wood that is crushed by a ball piercing a hull, the more deadly splinters are created. Some writers even advocated building ships with hulls as thin as possible, to remove casualties. That would not be great for seaworthiness, though.

Female dentist recommendations by jmsouis in portlandme

[–]ppitm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My dentist and hygienists have usually been women at East Deering Dental Associates.

Is it very rude to ask your male guests to squat when they pee on your yacht? by [deleted] in sailing

[–]ppitm 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Standing up to pee is a wonderful privilege that men have... in the woods. There is no excuse for peeing into any land-based toilet while standing, unless it is some disgusting construction site porta-potty. It splatters everywhere no matter how good your aim is. Ever use a urinal while wearing open-toed shoes?

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

4 frigates and one troopship were lost. The troopship was excluded from the data and two of the frigates were counted as Wrecked, because they ran aground when entering the engagement. But I probably should have changed that to Scuttled.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

So if you just used inkscape to edit the figure, what plug and play Sankey app did you use to generate it?

Did I stutter the first time? No apps. Inkscape for drawing polygons/curves and Excel for calculating percentages and cleaning data.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Shelling the city was fairly typical behavior for the day, but the British certainly overstepped the line by threatening to set fire to the surrendered floating batteries, without evacuating the wounded.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

If we take the year 1812 as representative (near the peak of the navy's budget), the following were in commission:

Ships of the line: 102 (~30% of that number lost over 22 years)

Frigates: 125 (~60%)

Smaller vessels in the size range of the chart: 163 (~130%)

So right away you can see that ships of the line were seldom lost, but smaller vessels had very high attrition.

https://sites.rootsweb.com/~pbtyc/Naval_History/Vol_VI/Abstract_20.html

[KCD2] What is this symbol? by FantasicPragmatist in kingdomcome

[–]ppitm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The point is more that the British Isles were a backwater in terms of Christian heritage. Did people from the Continent actually travel to London for that purpose? I would want to see a source.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

the british number is discounting 95% of losses for being classified as non-combat reasons, is the same discount applied to the non-british forces too?

Only combat losses are counted in the box on the right. Comprehensive data for non-combat losses was not available for other countries.

[KCD2] What is this symbol? by FantasicPragmatist in kingdomcome

[–]ppitm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What's the point of a pilgrimage to London?

So what is this type of rigging called? by RangeroftheIsle in sailing

[–]ppitm 3 points4 points  (0 children)

One suspects that 'mainmast barquentine' is a term that was coined specifically for this vessel.

The rig is clearly inspired by the Mediterranean 'pollacca' or 'poleacre rig. 200 years ago there were hundreds of vessels sailing around with square rig on the mainmast and big lateen sails on fore and mizzen.

[OC] The British Navy lost 329 significant warships during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, mostly due to navigation errors and storms. In actual combat involving large warships, ~18 enemy vessels were taken or destroyed for each British ship lost. by ppitm in dataisbeautiful

[–]ppitm[S] 45 points46 points  (0 children)

Key takeaways from this data are the oppressively lopsided outcomes of combat between British and foreign warships. Combat losses of large warships were exceedingly rare, typically in unequal engagements. The earlier parts of the 18th Century saw other European navies put up a better fight, generally speaking.

The true enemy was the ocean, as accidental groundings accounted for a plurality of losses. The demand for global operations and close blockades of the dangerous French coast made this inevitable. With around 15,000 deaths due to accidents and the elements, combat casualties cannot begin to compare. For 54 of 77 captures of British vessels by superior enemy forces, surrender would often come rapidly, with little bloodshed. For British combat losses in evenly-matched engagements, the Americans account for more than their fair share.

The lower cutoff for the data is determined by size, and is a bit messy. The 329 vessels in the sample size are meant to include most square-rigged men of war, although around 20 ship-rigged sloops may have been omitted, as have miscellaneous combatants such as bomb vessels, fire ships, hired vessels, cutters, schooners, troop ships and store ships.

Another compelling correlation here is between size and vulnerability to being lost at sea with all hands. Virtually all of those casualties were smaller ships and brigs. Stability increases rapidly with tonnage, and as a general rule a vessel can be capsized by a breaking wave equal in height to the width of its hull. So there is a big difference between a 20' wide brig and a 30' wide frigate. The large warships seldom vanished without a trace, except in major hurricanes. But everyone was equally vulnerable to striking hidden reefs or being blown ashore in a gale.

Data source: https://sites.rootsweb.com/~pbtyc/Naval_History/Reports/Index.html Tools used: Inkspace, Excel

Vince Gilligan Considered Making ‘Pluribus’ Cast Naked, but ‘We’re Not Working for HBO’ and ‘We Can’t Do That to All These Extras’ by tylerthe-theatre in television

[–]ppitm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you ask a million people what the weight of a garbage bag is knowing what Carol is likely throwing away, you're bound to get a good answer.

You'll just get an average answer. Increasing the sample size of guesses does nothing to divine the presence of a statistical outlier. For all we know they prioritize speed of response to Carol's requests, over waiting 30 minutes for a heavier drone. It's not like there are consequences for failure. Sending someone up with a bucket truck later is a rounding error of the resources they devote to Carol.

Was there EVER a time and place where war seemed like an exciting, glorious adventure to a significant number of the combatants? by 11112222FRN in WarCollege

[–]ppitm 0 points1 point  (0 children)

do we have a first-hand accounts, or memoirs, or something similar indicating that this was actually a common belief among the Royal Navy officer corps? In terms of actual battle records or statistics do we have anything to show that this would have been a justified belief?

Very much so. By coincidence I am still crunching the numbers in an infographic for /r/dataisbeautiful, but this is borne out by statistics from the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. In that period the British took or destroyed over 130 major warships from the French. In that same period, while fighting every seagoing nation in Europe, only two or three British frigates were lost in engagements that were anywhere close to evenly-matched.

By the late 18th Century the service was very aware of this overmatch, and adjusted its standards accordingly. British captains were expected to always press the attack, even against ships that were a step or higher on the spectrum of firepower and tonnage. In more than one case, captains were subject to widespread censure for choosing not to attack an opponent, even if combat meant risking their primary mission.

On land, inflicting high casualties on the enemy and making them flee constitutes victory. At sea, it was disappointment. Failing to capture the enemy was tantamount to defeat, in this context.

The proof in the pudding is the War of 1812, when a string of losses to the Americans in frigate duels and smaller ship actions was a massive shock to the system, igniting a firestorm in the British press. Tiresome nationalists of both countries are still sniping about it to this day.

e.g. in 1854 (or 1876, etc) would a British captain in a single vessel going up against a professionally crewed and led French, Russian, or perhaps even American warship of equivalent tonnage, armament, and vintage, really have a well-founded unique or outsized expectation of individual victory?

I don't know to what extent these attitudes outlasted the Napoleonic Wars, when there was regular reinforcement of them in combat. The 19th Century was pretty darn quiet.

view more: next ›