07-10-2003, 01:33 PM
One may argue that it wasn't the skill of the ship-builders...it was their insanity. ;)
No one prior to Joshua Humphreys and Josiah Fox had contemplated the idea of building a frigate that was longer, faster, and carrying as heavy as the guns they intended for the ship. There's some technical limits to such specifications, and if Humphreys had submitted his designs to a competent Admiralty (something that the fledgling nation did not yet have), he would have been laughed out of the building. No one goes around building a ship with the length-to-beam ratio as what was proposed, nor would they laden the gun decks of a frigate exclusively with 24-pounder long guns...
...unless they had some new-fangled idea to prevent the ship from springing her back. The transverse hull runners in Humphreys' and Fox's collaborated design carried the weight of the gun decks directly to the keel, allowing the ships to be built longer (and hence faster) and with the heavier guns needed to compensate for the inferior quality (back then) of American gunpowder and gun manufacturing. Hence, an American frigate was in actuality a bit bigger and had a heavier throweight than a typical European frigate, a "super-frigate" as it were: tough and heavy-hitting as a razee, but as fast as a true frigate.
No one prior to Joshua Humphreys and Josiah Fox had contemplated the idea of building a frigate that was longer, faster, and carrying as heavy as the guns they intended for the ship. There's some technical limits to such specifications, and if Humphreys had submitted his designs to a competent Admiralty (something that the fledgling nation did not yet have), he would have been laughed out of the building. No one goes around building a ship with the length-to-beam ratio as what was proposed, nor would they laden the gun decks of a frigate exclusively with 24-pounder long guns...
...unless they had some new-fangled idea to prevent the ship from springing her back. The transverse hull runners in Humphreys' and Fox's collaborated design carried the weight of the gun decks directly to the keel, allowing the ships to be built longer (and hence faster) and with the heavier guns needed to compensate for the inferior quality (back then) of American gunpowder and gun manufacturing. Hence, an American frigate was in actuality a bit bigger and had a heavier throweight than a typical European frigate, a "super-frigate" as it were: tough and heavy-hitting as a razee, but as fast as a true frigate.
Political Correctness is the idea that you can foster tolerance in a diverse world through the intolerance of anything that strays from a clinical standard.