Explanation: During the First Punic War, Rome started a naval war against Carthage, one of the foremost naval powers in the Mediterranean, all whilst not having a fucking navy. Forethought is for Gr*ekoids!
In order to remedy this extreme imbalance, first, Rome created a navy, taking a Carthaginian shipwreck and copying the design 100 times over. Instant navy! Second, once it became apparent that complete landlubbers like Roman troops were no match on the seas for veteran sailors and marines, the Romans installed a curious contraption known as a corvus (‘Raven’, because of its resemblance to a raven’s beak) consisting of a glorified board with a nail in it that could be dropped onto the enemy ship, allowing men without their sealegs to go aboard the enemy ship and engage in hand-to-hand combat. No specialized marine training needed! This was extremely successful, as Romans were quite skilled at traditional hand-to-hand combat, and marines were usually less-heavily armed than traditional land troops - balance is (usually) important when transferring from one unsteady ship to another!
The corvus, however, also imbalanced ships in rough waters, and made them prone to capsize - once Roman fleets had gained enough training and experience to fight the ordinary way, the corvus was mostly abandoned.
They lost something like three whole fucking fleets to storms, they really should have just stopped sailing into storms at some point.
The corvus sounds like an OP strat if they had found a way to construct it that didn’t make their ships sink. I do wonder how hard they would have been to disassemble before a storm, or how close the storms were to the actual fighting.
Probably was simple to disassemble at port, likely troublesome while at sea.
Later Roman ships would adopt grappling hooks launched by shipboard ballistae instead.
My neighbor told me coyotes keep eating his outdoor cats so I asked how many cats he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new cat afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding shelter cats to coyotes and then his daughter started crying.
Took me forever to find because I remembered it as being about goldfish and the neighbor’s dog for some reason.
First fleet sank in a storm. So I built another one. That one sank in a storm. But the third one stayed up!
Bravo! Meme successfully subverted.
