The dockyards themselves were huge complexes of dry docks, worksheds, mast ponds, storehouses, saw pits, and roperies (a man-o’-war required 20 miles of rope for its rigging). The Royal Naval dockyards at Plymouth, Portsmouth, Deptford, Woolwich, Chatham, and Sheerness were the country’s biggest employers, with some 15,000 on the roll, many of them highly skilled workers. The Navy expanded from a strength of 173 warships in 1688 to 732 in 1809.īy Nelson’s time, the Navy was Britain’s greatest industry. Britain became the dominant power in the Caribbean, North America, and India.
The value of British overseas trade increased ten-fold during ‘the long 18th century’ (1688-1815). The island race became an imperial race, and the spearhead of empire was, of course, the Royal Navy. Commerce and colonies were thereafter a central preoccupation of Britain’s ruling classes. The events of that year signified that Britain would not become an absolute monarchy: it would remain a polity in which the power of decision would be vested in a Protestant Parliament formed of men of property – a collective social elite formed of nobility, gentry, merchants, and bankers. The rise and rise of the Royal Navyġ688 was the year in which the Glorious Revolution confirmed the outcome of the Civil War. It was something deeper, with roots going back to the very origins of British sea-power in the late 17th century – the final consummation, in a sense, of more than a century of accumulating maritime experience and success. Yet this was not some whimsical device, nor even simply the instinctive cunning of a master of war.
But all approved: ‘It was new – it was singular – it was simple!’ Nelson explained that ‘no captain can do very wrong if he places his ship alongside that of an enemy’.
Endless sky join navy full#
With Navy pilots trained in the United States Navy Fighter Weapons School and then those further trained by them in the fight, the casualty rate changed to 1:12, meaning Americans were scoring 12 times more aerial victories than the enemy.Īgain, we have not had the opportunity to see how the numbers would hold up (or be surpassed) today, but given that American military technology has only steadily improved, training has never flagged, and given that the same can't be said for the country's potential adversaries, it's entirely plausible that in a future war with American Navy pilots seeing air-to-air combat, Americans would be dominant.Instead of sailing parallel to the enemy fleet in line-ahead formation, such that full broadsides could be fired as soon as possible by as many ships as possible, the British fleet would be formed into two divisions and these would sail directly towards the enemy line, cutting it at right-angles into three segements. In the middle and later years of the 1960s, prior to the Ault Report and TOPGUN training, Naval fighter pilots over Vietnam were experiencing an approximate 1:4 casualty ratio against enemy pilots, meaning for every four planes an American downed, one American was shot from the sky after the implementation of TOPGUN training, according to the U.S.
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