Wrecked with inconsistency

In the timeline Burnished Rows of Steel, a number of ships suffer navigational failures and are lost accidentally. However, essentially all of them are British; this is at odds with the real historical record.

In Burnished Rows of Steel, the Orpheus and the Conqueror are wrecked, as is the Orlando (which suffers a navigational failure when attacked by spar torpedoes the Union should not yet have). In addition to these three wooden ships (two of them powerful capital ships), the British also lose to navigational failure or general accident the Meteor (collides with a reef at four knots, sticks itself immovably) and the Warrior and Defence (Warrior breaks the laws of physics and accelerates to fourteen knots before driving directly into Defence, somehow contriving to ram Defence below the waterline despite lacking a ram), adding three ironclads to the "crash" tally.

As against this, no Union ships suffer any sort of navigational failure.

In reality, over the twenty-year period which TFSmith has stated he will be using for comparison, the British lost the following unarmoured ships from their large and highly active navy:

HMS Orpheus (wrecked 1863)

HMS Conqueror (wrecked 1862)

HMS Amazon (collided and sunk 1866)

HMS Niobe (wrecked 1874)

HMS Rattler (wrecked 1868)

HMS Gnat (wrecked, 1868)

HMS Racehorse (wrecked, 1864)

HMS Pandora (crushed by ice, 1881)

HMS Griffon (sunk by collision, 1866)

HMS Osprey (wrecked, 1867)

HMS Magpie (wrecked 1864)

HMS Slaney (wrecked 1870)

HMS Trinculo (wrecked 1870)

HMS Lively (wrecked 1863)

Total: 14 incidents. Orlando is not on the list, though Orpheus and Conqueror are.

And the Union lost the following unamoured ships from their (except during the Civil War) small and not very active navy.

USS San Jacinto (wrecked 1865)

USS Oneida (collided and sunk 1870)

USS Saginaw (wrecked 1870)

USS Saranac (wrecked 1875)

USS Brockenbrough (driven ashore, 1863)

USS Adirondack (wrecked 1862)

USS Anna (wrecked 1865)

USS Crocus (wrecked 1863)

USS Henry Andrew (wrecked 1862)

USS Kingfisher (wrecked 1864)

USS RB Forbes (wrecked 1862)

USS Sacramento (wrecked 1867)

USS Shepherd Knapp (wrecked 1863)

USS Sumpter (sunk by collision, 1863)

USS Periwinkle (crushed by pack ice, 1872)

USS Peterhoff (sunk by collision, 1864)

USS Mingo (sank, 1862)

USS Maria (sunk by collision, 1870)

USS Lavender (wrecked, 1864)

USS Lavinia Logan (wrecked, 1864)

USS Violet (wrecked, 1864)

Total: 21 incidents.

Of especial note is the 1870s. Firstly, the British navy was considerably larger than the shrunken United States navy. Second, both nations were at peace and therefore might be considered to have a 'normal' operational tempo- though, of course, the Royal Navy's worldwide presence made them far more active than their American equivalent. Despite this, the British lost three ships and the US five.

In armoured ships the tally is closer to even, with the British losing Lord Clyde (repairable had the hull not been rotten), Captain and Vanguard. The loss of the Victoria, which TFSmith bases the loss of Warrior and Defence on, is outside the period he stated; this is another example of flagrant cheating.

The Union lost Monitor and Weehawken in OTL, both in the Civil War, along with the grounding of Osage. Of these, two (the Monitor and Weehawken) are due to fundamental problems with the low freeboard design. No ironclads are lost by the Union in this way in this TL.

Making things worse for the ironclad comparison is that the two are not directly comparable, for statistical reasons:

The Union's population of ironclads was around twenty and they were mostly only active during the Civil War (and not all of that), while the Royal Navy cycled at least sixty ironclads through itself over the next twenty years with an average service period more like 6-8 years – thus the Union suffered roughly one accident for every twenty ironclad-years of service and the British suffered one for every 120 ironclad-years of service.

For the most part, the Union ironclads which were active were doing comparatively “low risk” activities, rather than manoeuvring as a fleet (the cause of the loss of both Vanguard and Victoria) or for that matter attempting to rescue a ship in constricted waters (Lord Clyde). As for the Captain, most Union ironclads never served outside coastal waters and were not subject to the conditions which sunk Captain.

Thus, the relative distribution of accidents in BROS is heavily weighted towards the British, in spite of the statistical suggestion that if anything it should be the other way around. The cause is much like that for the British Army – the British Army and the Royal Navy were both continuously active for most of the nineteenth century, while the Union Army and the Union Navy did very little outside the Civil War. As such, the British had far more in the way of opportunities for mistakes in the first place.

Compressing the timescale of two decades of accidents (or more, if one is inclined to cheat) down to the length of the Civil War is a major double standard.

By this logic, of course, the most feared navy in the world should be that of the Swiss.