Explanation: During the First Punic War, Rome started a naval war against Carthage, one of the foremost naval powers in the Mediterranean, all whilst not having a fucking navy. Forethought is for Gr*ekoids!
In order to remedy this extreme imbalance, first, Rome created a navy, taking a Carthaginian shipwreck and copying the design 100 times over. Instant navy! Second, once it became apparent that complete landlubbers like Roman troops were no match on the seas for veteran sailors and marines, the Romans installed a curious contraption known as a corvus ('Raven', because of its resemblance to a raven's beak) consisting of a glorified board with a nail in it that could be dropped onto the enemy ship, allowing men without their sealegs to go aboard the enemy ship and engage in hand-to-hand combat. No specialized marine training needed! This was extremely successful, as Romans were quite skilled at traditional hand-to-hand combat, and marines were usually less-heavily armed than traditional land troops - balance is (usually) important when transferring from one unsteady ship to another!
The corvus, however, also imbalanced ships in rough waters, and made them prone to capsize - once Roman fleets had gained enough training and experience to fight the ordinary way, the corvus was mostly abandoned.
They lost something like three whole fucking fleets to storms, they really should have just stopped sailing into storms at some point.
