Kaiser as Lissa's wooden glass cannon

A wooden ship of the line looked like a glass cannon against explosive shells, but it could still deliver a formidable broadside. At Lissa, the Austrian 92-gun Kaiser fought in the fleet's battle line and emerged dismasted rather than destroyed. The ship was still extant after 1918 and had passed to Italy as a war prize, although its final fate is uncertain. Its survival shows that a new technology's theoretical advantage does not make every older platform helpless in actual combat. Austria still needed an armored core, but Kaiser supplied useful mass and firepower around that core because it was available.