>>20491764Early steamships were hybrids ships, where they have both sailing rigs and a steam engine. Pic related is what they look like your average frigate of the era, except it has a smokestack.
Before you get worried about anything. These early steamships require a lot of fuel to use the steam engine so unless the sitution requires it, the steamships rely on their sails for travel. Plus the engine itself only gives a slight speed advantage over sailing ships of the era, so speed is not a factor. Overall the steamships would have a short operational distance, and because fuel (coal in this case) takes up most of their hold, they would not be practical for commercial shipping fleets. At best it would be used to transport small, but extremely valuable goods, or ferry VIPs and diplomats and make most of the journey by sail anyway. So /nasfagq/ doesn't need to worry about these ships undercutting their business.
Those drawbacks are why I said any streamships deployed to aid /risu/ would be entirely situational on if /risu/ has fuel to maintain them.
As for the ironclads, those are 100% constrained to the main island and are not ocean worthy. Plus any worry about a work around I.E. /∞/ building a shipyard on another continent that is capable of producing them, is null because of fear that the shipyard would be captured and used to produce ironclads that would then be used against /∞/ and their allies.
