HMS Royal Sovereign (1891) - Technical Characteristics

Technical Characteristics

Royal Sovereign was laid down on 30 September 1889 and completed in 1892. Built at Portsmouth Dockyard she was 410 feet long and had a maximum cruising speed of 17 knots. She cost £913,986 to build. Her armaments included four 67-ton 13.5-inch guns and several smaller calibre guns.

She was the name ship of a class of battleships built in response to the Naval Defence Act of 1889 which allocated £21.5 million pounds to construct 18 torpedo gunboats, 42 cruisers, and 10 battleships. Traditionally Britain had been content to maintain a larger fleet than her rivals so as to have "maritime supremacy". Recent thinking in naval strategy had come to the conclusion that this was insufficient, and that total "command of the sea" was required. The 1888 and 1889 Naval exercises had demonstrated the great difficulty of implementing Britain's traditional policy of blockading any enemy within its own ports, because of the problems keeping steamships indefinitely at sea at long distances from home ports. There was also continuing concern of war with allied France and Russia and although Britain had more ships of every class than these nations combined, this was not considered sufficient to guarantee such an enemy could be contained.

A special meeting of the Board of Admiralty was convened in 1888 to determine the necessary characteristics for the next generation of battleship. The results were taken to a wider meeting in November. Previous ideas of the importance of torpedo or rams as weapons were no longer considered important: It was appreciated that modern gun designs meant that engagements were likely to occur well outside the range at which these weapons could be used, so the ships were designed as gun platforms. It was necessary to armour the ships as well as possible against return gunfire, but also important to create ships with good seagoing qualities for operations in all weathers at high speeds, and to have regard for long endurance of coal supplies.

Breech loading guns of 13.5 in (343 mm) calibre were already in use and had proved their ability, so were adopted for the ship. Some ships had previously been built using turrets, but the difficulty of this was that the great weight of the turret meant it had to be placed as low as possible on the ship, leading to designs with low freeboard which frequently were wave washed in heavy seas. It was decided to adopt a "barbette approach", whereby the guns were mounted on an open turntable with small armoured shields. Heavy 17 inch armour extended downwards through the ship to protect the ammunition supply. This system allowed a freeboard of 18 feet (5.5 m), as compared to 11 ft (3.4 m) for the turret equivalent. Four guns were arranged in two pairs on barbettes separated towards either end of the ship, each having an arc of fire of 260 degrees. A secondary battery of ten 6-inch Quick Firing guns was placed in between the two barbettes, designed to provide potent, quick firing support for the main battery.

An alternative design approach sometimes adopted was to concentrate the guns into one central position, which could then be more heavily armoured. This was dismissed, because of the associated risks that a single good shot might disable much of the armament in one stroke, and the difficulty of effectively operating many guns from a small space. Recent developments of medium calibre quick firing guns also meant that wholly unarmoured sections of a ship, as in those designs which had a central citadel but unarmoured ends, might suffer excessive damage to the unarmoured sections from intensive fire. The main 18 inch compound steel and iron side armour extended two thirds the length of the ship in the central portion from three feet above the waterline to 5.5 feet below. Above this, thinner 5 inch armour was used, with coal bunkers designed to lie alongside the hull for added protection and watertight subdivisions. Six inch armour was used for the steel casemates housing the smaller guns in the central battery. An underwater armoured deck extended the whole length of the ship intended to protect the underwater sections from plunging fire. Approximately 32% of the ships weight was devoted to armour.

The Royal Sovereign class battleships were designed by Sir William White and were the most potent battleships in the world until HMS Dreadnought rendered them obsolete in 1906. In their day the Royal Sovereigns embodied revolutionary improvements in firepower, armour, and speed. However, they tended to develop a heavy roll in some conditions, and after HMS Resolution rolled badly in heavy seas in 1893 the entire class was nicknamed the "Rolling Ressies", a name which stuck even though the problem was quickly corrected by the fitting of bilge keels. Despite their greatly increased weight, they were the fastest capital ships in the world in their time.

When the 14,150-ton Royal Sovereign was completed, she was the largest warship in the world. She proved that guns and torpedoes were more effective in attack than defence and was a vital stepping stone to the famous dreadnoughts which superseded her.