#THE GREAT IRON WARS MOD#

Hall was to take her around to the Indian Ocean and there receive his instructions, but even this much (oddly) was supposed to be secret. She was to all appearances a private armed steamer. She was not listed with the ships of the East India Company's navy. The Nemesis was not commissioned under the articles of war. The rest of the officers and crew were civilian. With him now went two other Royal Navy men as first and second officers. Hall had studied steam at Glasgow he had made steamer passages across the Irish Sea and on the Hudson and Delaware rivers as a very young man had accompanied the Amherst embassy to China. Her commander was William Hall, a Royal Navy man past forty years of age who had received his master's warrant more than fifteen years before and had risen no higher. And though she carried only half the crew of an 18-gun corvette like the Larne or the Modeste, she was almost their equal in tonnage - and in appearance, being half again as long, seemed actually larger.Īs important as was the ship's combination of steam, windpower, iron, and a purpose built hull design was its captain and first second officers, all three from the Royal Navy: Two pivot-mounted thirty-two-pounders, several six-pounders and swivels, and a rocket launcher made up her armament. Just behind the paddle boxes, which were connected by a raised platform that served as a bridge, rose a single tall funnel. She was two-masted and rigged fore-and-after. Her rudder was equipped with an equivalent movable extension. This, though it held her draught to a maximum of six feet (much less if she was lightly loaded), guaranteed that she would slip dreadfully beating to windward, so she was equipped forward and aft with centreboards in open cases, each capable of being lowered by a hand winch to a depth of five feet. She was long in proportion to her beam, 184 feet against 29 if you forgot the paddle boxes, and her bottom was almost perfectly flat. If that were not novelty enough, her dimensions and some of her fittings were unusual too.

The technological novelty of this warship, Peter Ward Fay explains, lay in its use of iron:Įxcept for deck, spars, and sundries, she was built entirely of iron. Adding to the ability of this this ship to serve as a particularly apt symbol of the industrial north's contribution to the British empire, the Nemesis was built in Liverpool shipyards and 'launched on the Mersey late in 1839 by John Laird for the Secret Committee of the East India Company.' The embodiment of British capitalism, enterpreneurship, technology, and the ability of its merchants to force their will on what had once been the world's greatest empire was the Nemesis, a long, narrow flat-bottomed steamboat that proved not particularly seaworthy but perfectly suited to what later become known as gunboat diplomacy. Characteristically, at the core of this British military superiority lay iron and steam, the key components of that Industrial Revolution that, for a time, made Great Britain both the world's leading naval and economic power. Uperior British military technology played an important role in the Chinese Opium Wars, enabling a mere commercial firm owned by stockholders to defeat the naval forces of a nation that described itself as the Middle Kingdom - a country, that is, of such superiority to all others that it served, or so its rulers proclaimed, as the mediator between heaven and earth. Usually it’s rolled into Russia (like in the 1914 version of Axis and Allies), so to see it treated independently is awesome, though not unexpected for Hearts of Iron.The Nemesis Steamer Destroying Chinese War Junks, in Canton River (1842). Despite being a small power compared to say, the UK or France, it had a massive, catalytic role in the conflict that’s not always represented well in fiction. Serbia sounds like an interesting one to play. In terms of featured sides, all the major players are represented, with new focus trees and 3D models: It comes with two scenarios - a prelude set in 1910, in the form of the Balkan Wars and Agadir Crisis and The Great War itself, starting in 1914.

#THE GREAT IRON WARS MOD#

Paradox’s Hearts of Iron 4 is one of the best World War 2 strategy games you can buy and with the release of the fan-made mod “The Great War”, you can now reenact World War 1 with all the bells, whistles and artillery the latest iteration has to offer.Ĭreated by “Wolferos”, version 0.1.3 of The Great War mod is currently marked as an open beta, though it’s packed with an insane amount of content.

The great iron wars