Ironclads and wooden ships at the Battle of Lissa

Period labels such as the Ironclad Age can hide how mixed real fleets were. At Lissa, Austria and Italy assembled forces from armored ships, wooden warships, screw corvettes, and paddle vessels because those were the assets available. The battle was fought between national fleets rather than a handful of experimental vessels, making the mixture a useful picture of real force structure during transition. Naval eras are better understood as overlapping layers of capability than as fleets composed entirely of the type that later named the age.