1:300 HMS Victory by Langton

[Berthier]

I've been reading a couple of books recently on the ACW at sea and the improvisations they used to fit out vessels. The Confederates were so short of iron they wrapped railway tracks onto woodensided vessels to "armour" them and basically bolted anything they could to the ship sides to protect the crew.

The cotton bales are a throw back in concept to similar earth filled bundles used for protection on land for centuries. I'm not sure what a cotton bale weighed but the cotton fibres would have formed a lattice network spreading in different directions in the bale allowing the capture of splinters and disspitation of force of projecticles hitting them. Very inventive.

[Moideeb]

I've been reading a couple of books recently on the ACW at sea and the improvisations they used to fit out vessels. The Confederates were so short of iron they wrapped railway tracks onto woodensided vessels to "armour" them and basically bolted anything they could to the ship sides to protect the crew.

The cotton bales are a throw back in concept to similar earth filled bundles used for protection on land for centuries. I'm not sure what a cotton bale weighed but the cotton fibres would have formed a lattice network spreading in different directions in the bale allowing the capture of splinters and disspitation of force of projecticles hitting them. Very inventive.

Absolutely, they were also very useful for protection from musket fire. Though i think musket fire still counts as hish velocity fragments.
Bosuns mates sometimes held metal hoops when stowing hammocks in the netting and if a mans rolled hammock didn't fit through the hoop he would be made to roll it again, i guess the tight compression added better protection.

[csadn]

The cotton bales are a throw back in concept to similar earth filled bundles used for protection on land for centuries. I'm not sure what a cotton bale weighed but the cotton fibres would have formed a lattice network spreading in different directions in the bale allowing the capture of splinters and disspitation of force of projecticles hitting them. Very inventive.

It helped that most cannons were still firing ball ammo -- big, blunt, and relatively slow. Conical shells would have ripped apart a cottonclad in moments (assuming the Union contractors weren't f***ing with the ammo -- the crew of CSS _Alabama_ reported after sinking USS _Hatteras_ that the "dud" shell found in the sternpost was a dud because instead of being filled with black powder, it was filled with black-painted *sand*...).