ORIGINAL: catwhoorg
ORIGINAL: Jorge_Stanbury
The best warship of all time:
The Hellenistic Quinquereme
I was thinking Athenian Trireme woudl be worthy of inclusion.
Fast, maneuverable, and well crewed.
"All time" for most shows really means the last 50-60 years
Some posters with a lot more historic knowledge than the "Military Channel" (Iowa class? Seriously?) beat me to the punch overnight, but I'll give my list.
1. The Athenian Alliance triremes at the Battle of Salamis. Arguably the most decisive naval battle in world history, certainly for the West. If Persia had won and defeated the Greek city states, Greek learning would have been subsumed into Persian culture. Greek learning in math, science, archetucture, and philosophy would not have been available to Rome when it took Greece as a province in the 2nd C. BC, to be taken up by them, preserved, and expanded into vast civil engineering projects. That learning would not have been available to the early Church, which took it from a falling Rome and preserved it for a thousand years until the Renaissance.
More locally, a Persian victory in the second Persian War probably prevents Alexander from happening, and thus the Hellenization of Asia Minor and the Near East does not happen. Arguably, the entire Muslim expansion in the 7th and 8th centuries is severely changed by that series of events.
Salamis rules. In all of recorded history possibly the Most Important Day.
2. The galleys and galleasses of the Holy League at the Battle of Lepanto, in 1571. Muslim expansion into Europe was stopped in the east just as it had been stopped in the west by Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. Following Lepanto the Ottoman Empire reestablished naval dominance in the eastern Med and consolidated Muslim rule in North Africa, but it never again threatened Europe proper.
3. The English galleons and caravels against the Spanish Armada. Stopping the Armada cold through superior tactics and leadership while vastly outnumbered, the English victory secured England time to complete the Protestant conversion, opened up a new avenue for struggle in the New World, and set back Spanish designs on northern Europe by decades. Had the Armada prevailed and opened England to invasion the entire history of both Europe and North and South America would have been radically altered.
If any of these three battles had gone the other way most forumites would be speaking a different language. For that matter there is almost no chance WWII would have occurred, so, no AE, and no forum. Quite possibly no Internet either.
4. For this spot I would pick one not mentioned yet. The Monitor and her sisters, both single- and double-turreted. Instrumental in the blockade of the South, they were the single biggest reason European aid did not come to the CSA and allowed the Union to dissect the CSA from both the inside and outside. If the US Civil War had gone another way the whole course of European history in the 20th C. would have been different.
5. The Gato-class fleet submarine. (Surprise!) No single class of ship in WWII was more decisive on a strategic scale. These boats, with their follow-on classes, changed the course of WWII. Far more importnat in the ultimate defeat of Japan than any other platform, including the Essex-class.
For the next five slots, in no order I would include the Essexes. Also the standard RN 74-gun ship-of-the-line of the Napoleonic era, the USS Nautilus, the war junks of the Ming Dynasty, and the HMS Dreadnought.
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!! Thanks.
