British phrases

[barefoot serpent]

Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla

does anyone know why exactly fourteen pounds to the stone, and not a dozen, nor eighteen?

the standard cannon ball weight for a ship-of-the-line?

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by barefoot serpent

the standard cannon ball weight for a ship-of-the-line?

Doubt it, as there really wasn't one then. Two- and three-decker ships ran to having multiple calibers: their heavier armament being on the lower decks, with lighter guns next tier up and, supplemetarily, carronades -- approximately, seagoing howitzers, though not fired on high trajectories, as the state of the gunners' art simply wasn't good enough to hit a moving target from a moving platform with plunging fire, but their lighter weight/lower velocity combination allowed them to throw huge balls with enough range to do just fine in broadside engagements at half a sea mile and less -- around a thousand yards -- while not having to deal with the much greater weight of a long gun of the same bore.

The great guns would run to 24- and 32- and 42-pounders. Lighter-armed vessels might have long twelves, notably as bow and stern chasers, while the broadside guns would be of a shorter-tubed description so as to better fit crosswise on the gundeck. Cannon balls seemed rather, in the early nineteenth, to skip over the 14-pounder, going from 12- to the greater smashing power and carry of the 18-pounder. The whole -pounder scheme is quite like the shotgun's gauge or bore system, but cannonballs are in balls of iron, not lead -- eighteen pounds of iron, melted, will form into the same exact size of sphere every time when zero-geed off the top of a shot tower and caught in a tub of water at the bottom.

The American frigates of this era, contemporary with the USS Constitution, were apparently much noted for their use of big carronades as most of their armament, producing a stable ship, formidably armed and throwing a huge weight of broadside, without having to pay a weight or stability penalty and able to mount these great big bores high up in the hull in consequence, which means they could use this heavy armament even in quite high sea states that could prevent a more conventional ship of the line from using its heavy battery because it couldn't open its lower gunports without being swamped. Severe weather could cripple a first-rater's fighting abilities.

Any idea why the wheelhouse is the bridge?

Griff, probably because a bridge usually (there are exceptions, like the Iowa class BBs) extends from one beam end to the other across a ship -- handy for the steersmen in docking and other close maneuvers, and for a captain to get a good look aft as well as forward, on either side. Quite the new invention, once conceived, which I think accounts for the use of such a term.