The story of "wonderweapons" usually goes as follows:
>Country behind in war throws loads of resources into wacky idea that will surely turn the tide of the war
>Boring technological growing pains gimp them, and in the end the side that didn't bother with doing anything interesting is better off.
Not with ironclads, though. CSS Virginia was cobbled together to break the United States' blockade, and while it failed, it didn't fail because of it being too early technologically. It failed because the Union also made one of these wonderweapons and slammed it against the Confederates.
What else can compare to this? Ships are the perfect medium for wonderweapons, because they're just about the most expensive single thing. When else has naval tech jumped forward so much in one or two ships?
The spirit of Joseph Robinette (yes that's his middle name) Biden possessed me while I was writing this, so I forgot to finish one of my sentences. Ships are about the most expensive single thing in a country's arsenal.
>What else can compare to this?
Land ironclads were a bigger game changer when they first appeared than ocean ironclads were.
I mean, I suppose relatively they were better against horses than ironclads were against wooden ships, but in terms of their theater, ironclads were a far bigger deal.
Landships could be taken down by contemporary weaponry, like field guns and artillery. Ironclads' only real opponent was wooden ships, which utterly crumbled against them.
Ironclads completely changed the naval game. It's just that the naval game is questionably important in a lot of wars.
>doesn't just end a war, ends war
There are plenty of examples of what you're looking for, as long as you remember that the primary feature of a wonder weapon is the ability to produce them in a sizable enough quantity to use them tactically. The Roman legion formation, English longbow, shot and Pike formation, breach loading firearms, Radar, strategic bombers, all of these drastically change warfare wherever they were deployed, and made obsolete much of the contemporary military technology.
That's the boring definition of wonderweapons, the practical definition.
I'm talking about the classical all-your-eggs-in-one-basket sort of thing that costs oodles of cash and resources, not something like a practical improvement to firearms.
You already know the answer to this, nazi Germany and Cold War America, why are we having this thread AGAIN?
Oh yes, all of the magnificent, war winning wonderweapons the third Reich produced?
My point is that the classical wonderweapon was a money sink piece of shit relative to just putting those resources into something else, while ironclads were not.
Why pretend to be retarded?
Can you give us examples of what they were during the cold war and what Nazi Germany had?
By that definition even the ironclad doesn't count though, it was again a weapon which only mattered insofar as there was capacity to manufacture it and field it en masse. The boring answer to your question is no, there has never been a weapon which was so successful of purely technological grounds that industry to field it didn't matter. All weapons and tactics exist as Force multipliers, and a force multiplier only works if you have Force to multiply. Moreover, if you are so out classed that you need to develop some 100x multiplier there's not a lot that stops your peers from just taking and running with the same even more effectively. Arguably something like the Maxim gun being used against the Zulus was a Wonder weapon, but I don't think that's what you're looking for either because it wasn't developed during a war between near peers. In that case the atomic bomb is the closest you'll find. The ironclad is a relatively bad example within your criteria imo
This is just another stealth “southern superiority” thread, aka more looser worship
CSS Virginia is a very entertaining ship to talk about. It's a floating joke. But it's not some monument to southern superiority. At best it's a criticism of the Union for letting these fucking cavemen beat them to the punch.
The story of CSS Virginia is total clownworld stuff.
Scraped up from a salty river and as maneuverable as the continent of Australia, it didn't even have the armour down far enough to fully protect it, because southerners did a south on the displacement math.
This floating shitbox was mounted with a ram, because the Confederates thought that ironclads made guns obsolete.
This cargo-cult ironclad's captain got shot after getting out on deck and trying to snipe shore batteries, and lost its ram immediately after using it, nearly sinking the ship.
You’re talking to yourself Jesus Christ just go read the Wikipedia page for the 50th time today instead of spamming threads about it
Fucking Joseph B strikes again
Ok but have a nice day yankoid the world would be a better place if the South had won.
Yeah, if the South had been the only one with this new class of weapons it would have been wonderful, but again that is where capacity to manufacture a sizable amount of something makes significantly more difference. There's a lot of what ifs, and none of them played out because the ironclad wasn't a Wonder weapon, it was reasonably easy for any industrialized Nation at the time to manufacture. It was somewhat successful tactically, but there was no widespread use and it made no strategic difference. As I said above you have to have enough of a weapon to use it tactically throughout the theater for it to make a strategic difference.
Thank you for both proving me right and being the retarded stereotype to match, I honestly don’t know what you expect.
I think CSS Virginia fits the bill quite well, as against wooden ships it was actually something that was wildly effective. There was mania in Washington about it sailing up the Potomac and strafing the White House, they had no answer for it.
Well, no answer that wasn't an ironclad. CSS Virginia would've been a complete wonder weapon were it not for the Union pulling their finger out and fielding their own ironclads. That may reflect poorly on CSS Virginia, but on early ironclads as a whole, I don't think it changes much.
All "wonderweapons" are destined to be copied, as you said. You can't win a war with one massive meme invention. But I think being taken down by another comparable superweapon is just about the highest honour a technology can have.
>I think CSS Virginia fits the bill quite well
Nonsense. Earlier you said that a wonderweapon had to be monstrously expensive and consume so many resources it was "all your eggs in one basket". The CSS Virginia was novel, but its cost represented a tiny fraction of the CSS's military expenditures.
You also say that incremental improvements to firearms somehow don't count. However historically there were several major improvements in firearms that were not only very effective in war, but also represented a huge investment and consumed a massive portion of the military budget at the time. Giardoni air rifles with Austrian army, for example. Or the Dreyse needle gun.
He just wants to jack off to iron clads, probably read about them recently for the first time.
>its cost represented a tiny fraction of the CSS's military expenditures.
To my knowledge, it represented a very sizable part of their NAVAL budget. It's a naval weapon that could only ever win the naval war, it should be considered alongside other naval schemes.
>However historically there were several major improvements in firearms that were not only very effective in war, but also represented a huge investment and consumed a massive portion of the military budget at the time.
These probably do fall under the kind of category I'm thinking about, I just haven't really looked into them ever. Well done, good thing to bring up.
The battle of the first American iron clads is quite humorous. Both went into battle with only explosive shells, both expecting to obliterate the opposing fleet of timber ships only to waste their entire stock on each other for hours causing so much smoke they both thought they won.
It's even better when you realize that Monitor had guns completely capable of memeing on Virginia, but they just weren't loaded with enough powder.
And that they could've probably dented the armour if they weren't constantly spinning the turret in circles because it was AIDS to aim.
The Confederates also had experimental armour piercing spikes they left at home, along with all the actual cannonballs.
It's like God intervened to make this battle a draw, because he thought it'd be a cool introduction to ironclads. It's downright impressive no one won.
I would say aircraft carriers, but those took 20 years to become the super weapons that made every navy without them worthless.
the lame answer is nukes. if you have enough of them and are willing to use them, you cannot lose. worse case scenario is that your enemy has them too, in which case you have a stalemate.
the cool answer is picrel.
No that’s called you both loosing, a stalemate is MAD