I checked the Arleigh Burkes and they’re about $2 billion per ship. Is that for all the ships or just for one ship? I just checked, and the British battleships built 1889-1896 cost a total of ~£2 billion in modern terms. Ships went from being cheap and mostly costly due to steel to being expensive and mostly costly due to electronics. It's strange that the press only focuses on the failures of the Zumwalts and doesn't talk about the fact that there are plenty of good ships coming online. Oh, scratch all that! The US is adding nine ships to the fleet this year. Is it possible that I'm thinking of the wrong countries and we should be looking at the pace of construction of Chinese ships? I'd be interested to read about what has changed that makes the pace of construction of ships so different. Compare this to modern times where very few ships are being built. Reading through the pre-dreadnought article, I was struck by how many ships the British were building. Eight units were built, the last last three primarily to ensure continuity of work in the dockyards when the next class was delayed. The ships were crowded, and it proved nearly impossible to control the fire of three separate batteries. In practice, this arrangement didn't work particularly well. They were 16,000-ton ships, with 4 12" and 10 6" in the usual places and 4 9.2" guns in turrets on the corners of the superstructure. The British countered these ships with the first major improvement on the Majestic, in the form of the King Edward VII class of 1901.
#Pre dreadnought ships full
Improvements in armor had made it possible to provide reasonable protection against the 6" gun, improvements in gun technology had increased the rate of fire of guns of 8-9", and improvements in fire control had increased battle ranges to the point that 6" guns couldn't take advantage of their full rate of fire. An 18" lower belt and a 4" upper belt, the first use of pure steel armor on a British ship, provided protection, and their 18 kt speed set a new benchmark for battleships.ĭuring this time, foreign ships, most notably the American Virginia class, had begun to sprout guns between the traditional 6" and 12". For defense against torpedo boats, 16 6pdr and 8 3pdr guns were carried. They carried 10 6" QF guns in casemates on the sides of the ship, the first vessels to be so armed, and five above-water and two submerged 18" torpedo tubes were fitted. The main armament was two pairs of 13.5" guns in open barbette mounts. This made it possible for the Royal Sovereigns to maintain speed and fight their guns effectively in the typical seas found in the Atlantic. Second, the freeboard was now 18', as opposed to 10' in the proceeding Trafalgars. A bigger ship makes the designer's job easier, and White could avoid many of the compromises that had plagued older ships. First and foremost, this was because they were significantly bigger than their predecessors, at around 14,000 tons instead of the 10,000 or so that had been the standard since Warrior. The Royal Sovereigns were excellent ships.
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