The RN modified the design of the Lord Nelson-class battleship to include a secondary armament of 9.2 in (234 mm) guns that could fight at longer ranges than the 6 in (152 mm) guns on older ships, but a proposal to arm them solely with 12-inch guns was rejected. The Royal Navy (RN), the Imperial Japanese Navy and the United States Navy all recognised these issues before 1905. He proposed an "ideal" future British battleship of 17,000 long tons (17,000 t), with a main battery of a dozen 12-inch guns in eight turrets, 12 inches of belt armour, and a speed of 24 knots (44 km/h 28 mph). When the Italian Navy did not pursue his ideas, Cuniberti wrote an article in Jane's Fighting Ships advocating his concept. In 1903, the Italian naval architect Vittorio Cuniberti first articulated in print the concept of an all-big-gun battleship. Keeping the range open generally negated the threat from torpedoes and further reinforced the need for heavy guns of a uniform calibre. Another problem was that longer-range torpedoes were expected to soon be in service and these would discourage ships from closing to ranges where the smaller guns' faster rate of fire would become preeminent. Either the smaller- calibre guns would have to hold their fire to wait for the slower-firing heavies, losing the advantage of their faster rate of fire, or it would be uncertain whether a splash was due to a heavy or a light gun, making ranging and aiming unreliable. A related problem was that the shell splashes from the more numerous smaller weapons tended to obscure the splashes from the bigger guns. Gunnery developments in the late 1890s and the early 1900s, led in the United Kingdom by Percy Scott and in the United States by William Sims, were already pushing expected battle ranges out to an unprecedented 6,000 yd (5,500 m), a distance great enough to force gunners to wait for the shells to arrive before applying corrections for the next salvo. The ship was reduced to reserve in 1919 and sold for scrap two years later. In May 1916 she was relegated to coastal defence duties in the English Channel, before rejoining the Grand Fleet in 1918. Nor did Dreadnought participate in any of the other First World War naval battles. Dreadnought did not participate in the Battle of Jutland in 1916 as she was being refitted. Īlthough designed to engage enemy battleships, her only significant action was the ramming and sinking of German submarine SM U-29 thus she became the only battleship confirmed to have sunk a submarine. Her launch helped spark a naval arms race as navies around the world, particularly the Imperial German Navy, rushed to match it in the build-up to the First World War. She was also the first capital ship to be powered by steam turbines, making her the fastest battleship in the world at the time of her completion. He convened a Committee on Designs to evaluate the alternative designs and to assist in the detailed design work.ĭreadnought was the first battleship of her era to have a uniform main battery, rather than having a few large guns complemented by a heavy secondary armament of smaller guns. Shortly after he assumed office in 1904, he ordered design studies for a battleship armed solely with 12 in (305 mm) guns and a speed of 21 knots (39 km/h 24 mph). Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher, First Sea Lord of the Board of Admiralty, is credited as the father of Dreadnought. Likewise, the generation of ships she made obsolete became known as pre-dreadnoughts. The ship's entry into service in 1906 represented such an advance in naval technology that her name came to be associated with an entire generation of battleships, the dreadnoughts, as well as the class of ships named after her. HMS Dreadnought was a Royal Navy battleship whose design revolutionised naval power.
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