by Bruce BethkeHow do you fight a ship? Not the men on the ship; the solution to that mystery has been known for millennia. You get close enough to the other ship to fling across whatever you might have handy: rocks, spears, arrows—during the Battle of Lepanto some crews of Ottoman Janissaries were reduced to pelting the Holy League crews with oranges—being quite aware that by definition, when the enemy is within range, so are you. Then, when you've sufficiently reduced your enemy's ability to resist, you attempt to board, and take the ship at sword's point.
But to use the ship itself as a weapon: that takes discipline and cohesion. Ben-Hur to the contrary, the Greeks and Romans found that only crews of free men could be trusted to throw their backs into the oars and commit their all to ramming the other ship, in hopes of holing its hull and sinking it. After all, succeed too well and you might find your own ship too firmly entangled in a sinking enemy to escape.
The Romans came up with the innovation of the detachable ram, which could be cut away in an emergency. The Romans also came up with the corvus, a hinged ramp that could be dropped onto an enemy's ship to grapple onto it and ease boarding, and later, the Byzantine Romans came up with "Greek fire," a sort of bellows-powered flamethrower that was so secret its actual composition has been lost to history, and its powers have thus become near magical in subsequent retellings. And such was the state of the art, for a thousand years or more.
Our histories and traditions come largely from the English and the other northern and western Europeans, and our focus tends to be on the North Sea and Atlantic. In the Mediterranean, galleys remained the dominant means of projecting naval power far longer than anyone seems to realize. When cannons appeared, experienced galley warfare men immediately recognized them as being even better fighting beaks and rams, and mounted formidable batteries on the bows of their ships—batteries that fired in a forward direction only, and could be aimed only by maneuvering the entire ship. A Northern European sailor would never think that cutting down the bow of his ship and making it nose-heavy was a good idea.
The galley, and subsequent evolutionary developments (galliots, galleasses, and so on), ever more heavily up-gunned on the bow, remained in use in the Mediterranean and Black seas for centuries. The last great fleet action between galleys, the Battle of Lepanto, was fought in 1571 between the forces of the Holy League and the Ottoman Empire, and it's safe to say its outcome changed the history of the world, although our Northern European-derived history seems blissfully unaware of it. The last significant galley action was fought in 1717. The French commissioned their last first-line Mediterranean fleet galleass in 1720.
By that time, of course, the forces of history and technical evolution had eclipsed what had once been the state of the art. On the Atlantic coast, where oared craft larger than longboats were close to useless, designers had long since hit on the idea of deep-hulled and seaworthy ships driven by ever-larger sets of sails, packing batteries of somewhat aimable guns that fired from the broad side of the ship, rather than from the bow. When these two met—well, sometimes the galley won, because of its superior maneuverability in calm winds and shallow water. But more often the broadside ship shot the galley to pieces long before the galley was able to bring its heavy battery of forward-firing 24- and 36-pounders into play. In June of 1684, the frigate Le Bon single-handedly took on and defeated thirty-five galleys in a single action.
The age of the galley was done, but strangely, the idea of the ram lingered on for centuries longer. In a lot of important respects the C.S.S. Hunley was a galley equipped with a ram, and any Roman or Ottoman commander transported through time would have immediately recognized it. When steam replaced sail the idea of the ram once again came into vogue, and every important European navy built at least one. While the British ram Thunder Child features prominent (if briefly) in The War of the Worlds, it appears the Italian Affondatore was the only one ever actually used in combat for its designed purpose. At the Battle of Lissa, against the Austrian fleet, she succeeded only in damaging herself so badly that she foundered and sank two days later.
Nonetheless, the idea persisted, and persists to the this day. In the early days of the jet age Northrop designed and built the XP-79, a magnesium-plate near-supersonic "flying wing" fighter that was intended to slice through enemy aircraft. The pilot rode in what's best described as "Flexible Flyer" position, and whether the idea would have worked in practice remains a mystery as the sole prototype went out of control and augured in fifteen minutes into its only test flight.
It probably would not have worked. After a century of driving automobiles, we know far more now about the fluid dynamics of collisions that we used to. When a vehicle comes to a sudden stop, everything within it still has an inertia of its own and wants to continue in motion. The observation that most casualties in car accidents were caused not by the initial collision, but by the secondary collision of the occupant with the interior, led first to redesigned dashboards, then to seat belts, and in time to airbags. After a few decades of collecting data on airbag-involved collisions, though, it's now apparent that that is still not enough. We can build a vehicle that can survive the sudden decceleration of impact without going to pieces. We can immobilize the occupant's musculoskeletal structure. But the fluids within the occupant's body still have an inertia all their own, and want to continue to follow their own trajectory, at their own velocity.
Back in the 1930s or early '40s Isaac Asimov wrote and published a short story about space warfare that revolved around ramships. In typically smug Asimovian fashion the good guys won because the bad guys were so abysmally ignorant of history that they didn't recognize the ships' fighting beaks for what they were. As a spectacular means of committing suicide ramming a ship at relativistic speeds would have few equals, particularly if you wanted to reduce your crewmembers to red goo on the forward bulkheads or liquefy their brains inside their skulls. But if you're writing a space combat scene and thinking of going Greco-Roman retro, think it over, and then find a better way.
Perhaps you could have them board the enemy ship, and start a swordfight...
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