Good morning,
as a history nerd (with a focus on Ancient China and the 20th century, so this topic here is outside of my area of expertise) and gamer I stumbled upon the game "Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnought" and began playing it yesterday. A certain set of missions reminded me of a question that interested me for quite some time already and that I never found solid answers for.
We all know that during the American Civil War both monitor and casemate ironclads were used - for example USS Monitor itself and CSS Virginia (as an example for the latter type). Now monitors have a low profile, rotating gun turrets and a smaller crew while casemate ironclads have a higher profile, fixed gun positions and need a larger crew. I am no expert in naval history but it seems to me like monitors are much more feasible than casemate ironclads. Still, European navies used the latter type during the waning 19th century and even developed a successor, the centre-battery ship.
So my question is this - are there any major advantages of casemate ironclads over monitors?
Thank you all in advance!
I'll try to answer your question . Although I do not have relevant formal historical or technical background it is an area of my interest.
First of all there were a few factors that precluded its rapid adoption: early turrets were not quite reliable, so the fear of the turret jamming in the middle of the action caused a slower adoption of the turret itself. Also, as long as guns were powerful enough to penetrate the opponent's armour many people considered many smaller guns preferable to a few large ones - not only having multiple possibilities to hit would make the battle more predictable and less reliant on luck, but smaller guns were reloaded faster, so in some cases weight of shot thrown by a battery of smaller guns in, say, five minutes was larger than weight of shot thrown by the larger guns.
But more important is the issue of freeboard, that is, vertical distance between waterline and the ship's deck. Low-freeboard ships like monitors suffered a host of problems in the open ocean, starting from increased wear and ending with being unable to fire at all in rough weather or even risking being swamped by the waves and sinking (because surface ships were never hermetically sealed).
Ok, why you wouldn't then put a turret on a ship with the high freeboard? In the end it ended up happening with proper turret ironclads and their descendants, but compared to the central battery ironclads they often needed more weight of armor, not less, and also that mass was higher in the ship which raised its center of gravity and made it more unstable. That's why even by WWI when battleships' main guns are all emplaced in the turrets, smaller guns of 3 to 8 inches caliber were still predominantly placed in casemates.
That is not to say that that European powers were averse to the monitor - they built plenty of them for harbor and coastal defence, shore bombardment, and riverine warfare. They just treated it as a specialized vessel that can only fight in a narrow range of waters.