Dunderberg and Google

This is Steven Petrick Posting.

Google can be a wonderful thing. Back in the 1980s I played a game called "Ironclads", together with its expansion "Ironclads II". The first game was about the Ironclads of the American Civil War, the second was about the development of other Iron vessels in the years following that war, including those in Europe. Being a game, it had a lot of data about things you may never have heard of. One of those things for me was the U.S.S. Dunderberg. I had never heard of this ship, although some of the other gamers were aware of some of its history. In the game, the Dunderberg was remarkably modern, with a lot of internal compartmentalization making it difficult to sink, and she was heavily armored, making her hard to damage at all. But her guns were very short-ranged. The ship could get in close, and give better than it got. It was scary, other ships learned that it was slow, and so they would run from it and it would not "get to play".

Yet, historically, the Dunderberg never entered service in the U.S., being sold to France and scrapped just eight years later. It was actually too big to survive (being the largest wooden hulled ship ever built), and had severe structural problems as a result (the length was just more than wood could endure).