 It has been suggested that both the harsh saltwater environment and the constant swaying and rolling of a ship at sea caused problems for the complex mechanism.If the mechanism seemed too temperamental for the open sea, it was not true for rivers and harbors.Armstrong and Mitchell's 1867 HMS "Staunch", a gunboat described as a "floating gun carriage", used a single Armstrong rifled muzzle loader on a lowering platform with next to no armor.