A Bad Bad Idea: The Circular Monitors

Thinking outside the box is good. Straying too far from the box is bad. Very bad.

The Concept of Circular Monitors

During the 1870s, Russia started designing Monitors, ships that could defend the mouth of their rivers and stop any enemy incursions on their waterways. The problem is that they built them round!

Two of them were built, and both suffered the same problems: when idle, the ship spun round and round. When moving, it pitched and rolled so much even the most experienced crew members suffered from seasickness. When it fired its guns, the ship rotated and spun in the opposite direction.

Operational Challenges

They saw action once and had to be moored prior to the battle and used as a fixed gun position. They were soon put into storage and scrapped afterward.

-RBM