1/600 USS Roanoke

This is USS Roanoke, the most heavily armed monitor commissioned by the Union during the war. This was accomplished by a cutting down USS Roanoke, Merrimack's sister ship,to the waterline, and reconfiguring her as an ocean going monitor. Unfortunately, in this case, John Ericsson's ego ruined what was a potentially brilliant design.

Because she was not originally an Ericsson design, Ericsson resented her being commissioned and actively sought to either scuttle the project or redesign her to his own tastes. Whilst she was intended to serve with four Coles type turrets, the reluctance of the British Admiralty to export these weapons allowed Ericcson to swoop in and "redesign" her for his own purposes. This included reducing the number of turrets to three, and replacing the Coles  turrets with his own, heavier designs. Unfortunately, Ericcson did not take into account the additional weight of his turrets or their machinery. This was coupled with what in hindsight seems to have been a blatantly stupid deicsion: the machinery required to support those turrets was bolted directly to her wooden bottom as opposed to additional structural beams that could easily have been installed. As designed with the original armament, this would not have placed overmuch stress on the strucutre of the ship, as the weight had been accounted for and evenly distributed. With the Ericsson re-design, however, the need to reassess was conveniently forgotten.

This resulted in a structurally unsound vessel that took on alarming amounts of water while at sea and had an unfortunate tendency to dismount all her guns if firing a full broadside. By the end of the war, she was taking on 1.5 feet of water per day.

 James B. Eads unsuccessfully lobbied to have her re-armed with Eads turrets, an effort that might have saved the whole endeavor, but as many scholars of the period will tell you,  Ericsson could do no wrong in the eyes of Gideon Welles. As such, the flaws remained largely uncorrected, greatly reducing her utility , and she spent most of the rest of the war at Hampton Roads as a harbor defense vessel.  Here, at least, she served a useful role, preventing breakout attempts and a source of great consternation to the Confederacy. She was allegedly given a bounty by the CSN (a status shared by New Ironsides), but nothing ever came of this.

Still a perpetual favorite with wargamers, Roanoke could easily have been much more functional if only proper attention had been paid in her redesign or to the remedies for her inherent flaws. Admiral Dupont specifically requested her for his ill fated attack on Fort Sumter, and was only overruled when the Monitor was lost at sea in transit to take part in that same operation.

At the end of the war, Roanoke returned to her home port of Manhattan and remained the flagship of the New York City Port Authority until the late 1870s, when she was stricken and eventually scrapped.

Historically, Roanoke was painted in two patterns. As initially deplouyed, Roanoke was primarily black, with white turrets and pilot houses, and canvas turret awnings; later, this scheme was altered: her very prominant frigate bow and the outline of her hull were painted white, with a white identification band around the top of her stack. The galley stack was painted white in at least the latter, and possibly the former, instances..

We at black Army (all two of us) believe that this is the most accurate rendering of Roanoke to date in 1/600 scale. While others are very beautiful indeed, most tend to miss some of her cogent details, her turrets are often oversized, her frigate bow rarely depicted, and her awnings, which are seen even in photos of Roanoke at sea, forgotten.