CSS Mississippi - What might have been

CSS Mississippi as she might have appeared - complete with 20 gunports and 2 funnels

Last night saw the completion of model number 31 - the unfinished Confederate casemate ironclad: CSS Mississippi. She was being built at the same time as the Louisiana but suffered from the perennial problem of a shortage of skilled manpower to build her. Priority was accorded to the Louisiana in terms of labour and so she was unfinished when the Union forces arrived. She would have been a formidable vessel (at least on paper) but one has to wonder about the sheer waste of resources used on her - not to mention how on earth the South would have manned her, or conjured up the 20 guns she was to have mounted!

The designer hit upon the novel idea of using house building techniques to build her reasoning that there were more timber house building experts than ship builders and so she was quite angular in appearance. This is noticeable in the sharp lines of the bow and the stern. The top view of the CSS Atlanta in a previous post shoes this outline to advantage. She was to mount twin funnels in tandem and so I have incorporated this into the conjectural model above.

As she is, perhaps fittingly, the last casemate ironclad of the current batch I thought I would incorporate a picture of the Confederate heavy metal - I am unsure of the correct collective name for a group of Rebel warships! - and the names I shall be using for these when they are painted and based.

Confederate casemate ironclads of various types - from left to right (top row): CSS Mississippi, CSS Louisiana, CSS Texas and CSS Columbia. Second row: CSS Arkansas, CSS Tennessee (the first vessel of this name - a 'sister' to the Arkansas but burnt on the stocks whilst under construction to avoid capture in 1862), CSS Baltic and CSS Missouri. The small ship in the foreground is the CSS Manassas.

The next batch of ships will feature some more casemates but the above is sufficient to be going on with. The reason I have incorporated a pair of 'never was-ers' (Mississippi and Tennessee (1) is simply because if I did not then the quantitative advantage the Union would enjoy on the Mississippi would be too great for the purposes of a game. In reality the Louisiana and the Mississippi were both of great concern to the Union command even in their unfinished condition so I am tweaking history slightly to see 'what if?'.

The final three Confederate gunboats are now under construction - I cut the hulls and started on the superstructures last night. I would like to carry on building models for this (and fully intend adding to the collection in due course) but I need to get some paint on the models and get a return in gaming time for the investment of modelling effort!