Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Military History Visualized"
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Ships may have two broadsides, but the enemy ship is only on one side of any given ship. Basically, only half their firepower can be brought to bear on any given target. (never mind that not having enough gun crew to fully man both sides at once was a common reality.) Doubling doubles how many guns are in effective range of any given enemy ship, and thus how much DPS (well, damage per Minute, really) they're taking, by letting two ships get into effective range of it at once.
It doesn't double any given ship's output though, no.
Well, unless shenanigans happen such that, somehow, your attacking lines also have enemies on both sides of them, but that event would be a bit... special.
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Lack of standardization, for one. Further, larger cannons (quite obviously) weigh more, which becomes a problem for the ship's seaworthiness. Worse, larger cannon need larger shot, and both that and more range need more powder, which means a more powerful explosion, which, in turn, needs a stronger barrel or the entire cannon explodes. The metallurgy of the day wasn't up to it.
This is even more problematic as there were no recoil absorption systems. (well, sometimes there was some rope...) when the gun fired, the entire thing went violently backwards towards the middle of the ship. A bigger gun may or may not go further in that case, depending, but it'll do far more damage to anything it hits, even worse if it comes loose, and take substantially longer to put back into position... if the men can even move it.
Accuracy ran afoul of precision of manufacture issues. neither the barrels nor the balls were perfectly standardized, so there were always mismatches leading to tumbling. unevenness of the gunpowder (pretty much inevitable) caused more of the same. both could be compensated for to Some degree, but not eliminated. add to that the sea itself causing the ship to roll (and, bonus points, the larger, and thus the more stable as a gun platform, the ship was, the less seaworthy it was in bad weather, generally.) in a not Entirely predictable manner, and again, lack of precision manufacturing techniques meant that the necessary precise instruments needed to compensate didn't exist, and, well, accuracy beyond very short range was doomed.
Further, the cannons were not rifled, and were muzzle loading.
Pretty much all the problems come down to lack of standardized, precision manufacturing and a lack of needed advances in metallurgy. You'll notice that once both had been developed and figured out properly you got such fun things as cruisers and battleships... and even ww2 ships with radar missed quite a bit (to be fair, by that point the ships involved are moving a Lot faster and are engaging at much longer ranges, in worse weather, and/or at night.)
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