>>664416
>Why didn't any Western, or anyone else, ever use a sailing catamaran for anything, particularly for stuff where being able to sail faster than the next guy would mean everything: blockage running, recon, raiding, etc.
In the 18th century ships of the line were the primary combat vessels. Firing from the sides made it natural to position ships in a straight line. This had natural complications for both directing firepower and for sailing in line. Many navies were also composed of stolen ships (as they would not neccessarily sink them, allowing fleets to augment their own ships).
The first development designed around this tactic was to build more stacked decks= more guns on target. winning at the time was basically killing enough of the enemy to where they just gave up, which meant you would just walk over and they would surrender.
Cohesion was more valuable than speed using some of these sailing tactics. Doubling became a useful tactic.
Later, during the pax britanica and the industrial revolution, you saw a shift in the way ships fought. The British never built another wood ship after 1860, replacing the entire fleet from scratch. The dynamic shift of industrialization was you had to refuel ships with coal instead of having them rely on good seamanship skill to reliably use the winds which could be unpredictable. You saw a loss of range and endurance of fleets, but the british did still build sailing ships until around 1880 just to maintain endurance and strategic mobility. During the steam ships implementation, the the problem of heavy armor being better than the guns made rams a viable attack option. Ironclads became a type of vessel that could effectively be used against shore stations (in the bast it was seen as unheard of for a vessel to attack a fort, which would usually result in a loss). This time frame saw the development of explosive shells.
You also saw a large number of littoral barrels in the latter half of the 1800s, especially in the american civil war.
Findings of some of the few fleet battles in the late 1800s was that
>Steam gave a fleet new offensive options
>The ram was effective*
>Single columns were ineffective
*for a time in specific situations: the problem was that the more a column closed to concentrate firepower, the easier it was for it to get rammed. This is where you saw ideas come up that would produce similar tactics that would be used around WW2 and looked like British infantry square.
There were also several battles off the African coast and between japan and china that showed how bad of a tactic ramming actually was (hitting moving targets was not easy), which largely stopped the use of ramming. Look up the battle of the Yalu river https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Yalu_River_(1894)
Basically by the end of the 19th century, guns became more important in the debate of tactics