Origins
Between the origins of the armoured battleship with the French Gloire and the Royal Navy’s Warrior at the start of the 1860s, and the genesis of the Royal Navy’s Queen Elizabeth class in 1911, a number of battleship classes appeared which set new standards of speed. The Warrior herself, at over 14 knots (26 km/h) under steam, was the fastest warship of her day as well as the most powerful. Due to the increasing weight of guns and armour, this speed was not exceeded until Monarch (1868) achieved 15 knots (28 km/h) under steam. The Italian Italia of 1880 was a radical design, with a speed of 18 knots (33 km/h), heavy guns and no belt armour; this speed was not matched until the 1890s, when higher speeds came to be associated with second-class designs such as the Renown of 1895 (18 knots) and the Swiftsure and Triumph of 1903 (20 knots). In these late pre-dreadnought designs, the high speed may have been intended to compensate for their lesser staying power, allowing them to evade a more powerful opponent when necessary.
From about 1900, interest in the possibility of a major increase in the speed of Royal Navy battleships was provoked by Sir John (“Jackie”) Fisher, at that time Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Fleet. Possibly due to Fisher’s pressure, The Senior Officer’s War Course of January 1902 was asked to investigate whether a ship with lighter armour and quick-firing medium guns (6-inch to 10-inch (150 mm – 254 mm) calibre), with a 4-knot (7 km/h) advantage in speed, would obtain any tactical advantage over a conventional battleship. It was concluded that “gun power was more important than speed, provided both sides were determined to fight”; although the faster fleet would be able to choose the range at which it fought, it would be outmatched at any range. It was argued that, provided that the fighting was at long range, an attempt by the faster fleet to obtain a concentration of fire by ”crossing the T” could be frustrated by a turn-away, leading to the slower fleet “turning inside the circle of the faster fleet at a radius proportional to the difference in speed” (Figure 1). War games conducted by the General Board of the US Navy in 1903 and 1904 came to very similar conclusions.
Fisher appears to have been unimpressed by these demonstrations, and continued to press for radical increases in the speed of battleships. His ideas ultimately came to at least partial fruition in the Dreadnought of 1906; like Warrior before her, Dreadnought was the fastest as well as the most powerful battleship in the world.
Read more about this topic: Fast Battleship
Famous quotes containing the word origins:
“Compare the history of the novel to that of rock ‘n’ roll. Both started out a minority taste, became a mass taste, and then splintered into several subgenres. Both have been the typical cultural expressions of classes and epochs. Both started out aggressively fighting for their share of attention, novels attacking the drama, the tract, and the poem, rock attacking jazz and pop and rolling over classical music.”
—W. T. Lhamon, U.S. educator, critic. “Material Differences,” Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s, Smithsonian (1990)
“The origins of clothing are not practical. They are mystical and erotic. The primitive man in the wolf-pelt was not keeping dry; he was saying: “Look what I killed. Aren’t I the best?””
—Katharine Hamnett (b. 1948)
“The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.”
—Lewis Mumford (1895–1990)