Projects of ships with turrets, 1850-1860s, Cowper Coles:
Raft with gun:
Coles 1.jpg
Gun ship:
Coles 2.jpg
First project of full-size ironclad, ten double-barrel turrets (rebuilt of wooden ship-of-the-line)
Coles 3.jpg
Known about later projects with single-barrel turrets, 4000 ton with six 68-pdr guns, later - five 7-inch RML guns, later - four 9-inch RML guns.
Unknown British six-turret twelve-gun ironclad project (1860s?):
IMG_20211224_190154.jpg
 
Wow...

FWIW, the infamous circular Russian river-monitors seem to have been inspired by that formidable English treatise...
 
FWIW, the infamous circular Russian river-monitors seem to have been inspired by that formidable English treatise...
Sigh.

1. They weren't.
2. They weren't river monitors, they were coastal defense ships.
3. They weren't exactly "infamous", because they done their main function - deter enemy ships from attacking important ports and harbors - perfectly well. Their whole concept was basically caused by poor state of Russian Black Sea shipyards by 1870s; after Crimean War, Black Sea was demilitarized, so Russia have no reason to spend much on military shipbuilding here. So after limitations were removed, the shipyards on Black Sea were in rather outdated condition and struggled to build modern ironclad warships.

The Popovka's were the solution. Due to their simple hull shape - all frames and plates are the same - they could be constructed even by unexperienced workers. And they could carry much more guns & armor in limited displacement than "proper" ironclad of same size. Considering that Ottoman Empire have a massive ironclad fleet in Med, and Russia just started to rebuild Black Sea fleet, unorthodox solution was the only way to deter Ottomans.
 
A lessor known Confederate submarine project of the ACW was the Bayou St. John submarine found in 1878 in the bayou it is named for.

ConfederateSubmarine_SpanishFort_Mugnier_blocks.jpg


On display about 1890.
Today it's on display at the Louisiana state museum

1024px-BRStateMuseumJuly08SubmarineD.jpg



Nothing is known of the designer(s) or builder(s) and the sub was scuttled towards the end of the Civil War and likely any documentation was destroyed at the same time. But the sub itself does still exist so there's that...
 
Proto-armour-vessels during siege of Gibraltar: Battering-Ship.jpg
1781-Unknown-Floating-Batteries-AAA.jpg
 

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