Daily Roman History:

During the First Punic War Rome did not have a navy to speak of. A major issue for fighting a war over an island against a maritime trade empire such as Carthage. To rectify this Rome managed to get their hands on a beached Carthaginian vessel, and moved it inland. From here they reverse engineered it to build a craft of their own and set them in a lake to train the new sailors how to operate it. Even with the new ships they still lacked the experience in naval warfare, so to compensate for this they designed a device called a Corvus, basically a boarding ramp attached to their ship which was deployed when close enough to an enemy vessel. Once in place the Roman troops would move over and turn the sea battle into an infantry skirmish, which the Romans far excelled at.

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