ACW ship fields of fire…

[Autodidact-O-Saurus]

Is anybody aware of any primary or secondary sources that might list the the disposition of guns on ACW ships?

I’ve consulted most of the usual suspects: Silverstone, Canney, Gibbons, the Official Records–Series II, USN History and Heritage Command web site, various other books in my collection. Most of these sources list the armaments, but not the dispositions, e.g., which direction the guns could fire. For most ships, it’s pretty straight forward (no pun intended). But for some of those quirky Union river ironclads… seems to be anyone’s guess. It’s not like the dispositions were set in stone, but I would like to have reasonably historic data. I suppose I could dig out my old Yaquinto Ironclads game but I’d rather rely upon historic sources rather than someone else’s interpretation.

The reason I ask is because after several decades I’m refreshing my ironclad rules: Iron and Steam. I’ve written a program which reads in data about the ships and generates the *.pdf record sheets for the game. I’ve just got a handful of Union ships to complete for the data entry. So far I’ve got about 110 ships entered.

I’ve also started rebasing my ship models so maybe in a couple of weeks I’ll actually be ready to entice some friends into playing.

Thanks!

 

Self taught, persistently behind the times, never up to date. AKA ~ jeff
More verbosity: http://petiteguerre.blogspot.com/

[McKinstry]

I know it isn’t first hand but the game Ironclads and its’ expansion Ironclads II have individual ship cards that have a fairly detailed top down view showing fire arcs. I believe several of the ACW naval rules sets such as Smoke on the Water also have that information.

Most of those ships were fairly straightforward in their layouts and the arcs were pretty clear whether pivot, broadside or turreted. Conway’s earliest work has a bunch that were still in service for the US post 1865.

 

The tree of Life is self pruning.

[Author]

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