Era of Sail
Before the advent of the all-steel navy in the late 19th century, a capital ship was generally understood as a ship that conformed to the Royal Navy's rating system of a ship of the line as being of the first, second, third or fourth rates:
- First rate: 100 or more guns, typically carried on three or four decks. Four-deckers suffered in rough seas, and the lowest deck could seldom fire except in calm conditions.
- Second rate: 90–98 guns.
- Third rate: 64 to 80 guns (although 64-gun third-raters were small and not very numerous in any era).
- Fourth rate: 46 to 60 guns. By 1756, these ships were acknowledged to be too weak to stand in the line of battle and were relegated to ancillary duties, although they also served in the shallow North Sea and American littorals where larger ships of the line could not sail.
Frigates were ships of the fifth rate; sixth rates comprised small frigates and corvettes. Towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars and into the late 19th century some larger and more powerful frigates were classified as fourth rates.
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