[quote=@Vilageidiotx] The only situation I would see muskets coming into use is when you have some place so deprived they have to rely on homemade guns made with basic tools. You might be able to imagine a place so cut off or remote that an unskilled population builds guns based on only a basic knowledge of how they work. As for ironclads, steel production isn't particularly complex. It's one of those techs that required the discovery, but once discovered would require a disappearance of the knowledge to reproduce, and a lot of the advances in steel production were metalurgical and therefore reproducible up to a point with basic tools. There will be costs due to the lack of industrialized production, but those too would be shifted by the presence of so much scrap steel. I suppose the real question would be about need: what use is a large navy in a world where overseas trade is so limited? Even ironclads were pretty shit at bombarding simple forts. If you are building a navy for pirate hunting, then wood will work. Pirates, after all, will have limited access to naval equipment and hunting them won't necessarily justify the cost of an iron fleet. For pirate hunting an iron fleet might be a worse idea, since it would cost quite a bit more fuel and would be slower than a wooden ship. [/quote] Not to mention the power demand behind retrofitting a container ship to work like a paddle ship or any steam ship of the day. For example, the Great Western - the first steam ship to make a trans-Atlantic voyage - weighed 1,300-1,700 tons. By comparison a commercial cargo hauler weighs in excess 90,000-100,000 tons empty. So if we're talking retro-modding existing and modern haulers like we use today then the people doing the work will need to consider they're going to need to put an immense and excessive steam engine inside of it, and that would be in itself a very hard task. Not to mention the efficiency, unless it's linking up with coal stations along the way it's not going to make Europe in one trip.