ship size

[letterman]

whose ships were larger Korea or Japan's.whose Navy was larger ships and personell and who was considered the most powerful at the time....thanx john

[JPh]

Here's my understanding strictly from the show.

Korean ships were larger. But Japanese ships were much more numerous. Japanese navy personnel/soldiers far outnumbered their counterparts, the Koreans. Korean ships' cannons were superior to Japanese cannons. Korean ships were slower, but more maneourable because they were flat bottomed ships as opposed to faster but less agile V shape bottomed Japanese ships.

Japanese were probably known to possess a more powerful navy than Korea before the war simply because of their numerical advantage. But after the war began, it quickly showed that superior tactics, leadership, guns, and better geographically suited ships made the Korean underdogs the better navy by far.

[Trespasser]

Korean ships were built by the central government and were uniform in length and shape. The battleships measured 35 m x 9.5 m x 3 decks. The ships of other types did not participate in battle.

Japanese ships on the other hand were built by individual warlords and had no uniformity in shape and size. The biggest ship of the war, Nihonmaru, appoached 70 m in length and could better be described as a floating fortress instead of a battleship. Considering that Nobunaga had 6 of those armored floating fortresses, the Japanese cannon-carrying ships were probably larger than the Korean battleships, but they could not overcome the numeric deficiency in cannons. Whereas Korean ships carried 12 ~16 long-range cannons each, the Japanese ships were restricted to 3~6 medium-range cannons.

The majority of ships used in combat, called Sekibune, were narrower and faster than Korean ships, but they could not carry cannons and was one deck short(two deck) so the soldiers fought at a height disadvantage and made the boarding difficult.