Design
The four ships of the King George V class of the 1910 building programme were to have been repeats of the Orion class. However, the battle-cruiser HMS Lion, completed in May 1912 with her foremast ahead of the fore funnel, showed that this was a far better arrangement than that in the Orions, where it was the other way round. This modification produced a new and much improved class of battleship, a rare case where a battle-cruiser design influenced that of a battleship. Although the Orion and King George V classes were very similar, the position of the mast easily distinguishes the two types.
The first two ships of the class, King George V and Centurion, were initially fitted with pole type foremasts, but the advent of director firing required a more substantial mast, so they were refitted with heavier tripod masts. Audacious and Ajax were fitted with tripod masts from the outset.
Read more about this topic: HMS Audacious (1912)
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A design for living
Deeper into matter—
Not without due patter
Of a great misgiving.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“A good scientist is a person with original ideas. A good engineer is a person who makes a design that works with as few original ideas as possible. There are no prima donnas in engineering.”
—Freeman Dyson (b. 1923)
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—Sidney Buchman (1902–1975)