The Steam Confederacy chose pressure. Where the others went to electronics or to living ships, the Confederacy went to boilers, valves, brass, and heat, and then spent a long time proving the point on purpose. The engines are controlled detonations in brass jackets. The ships turn like loaded freight. Nobody in the Confederacy counts either fact as a defect.
A Confederacy hull is brass and iron over honest plate. The guns throw solid shot hard enough to make the newer empires polite. The workmanship is superb and slightly unhinged, because half the designers are experimenting on their own ships and the other half have dared them to.
Command sits with the great houses and the foundry guilds. Heirs, regents, pretenders, dueling aristocrats, engineer-primes who treat a challenge as a social occasion. Expect a formal warning. Expect drums. Then expect the broadside. They hit like freight because, ton for ton, they are freight, and it has been aimed.