In war, as in so many human endeavors, technology is a driver.  As new materials and methods arise, various weapon systems become ascendant, have their zenith, and then are replaced.  Few things illustrate this so well as the transformation of the "Ship of the line" from a slow limbering sailing vessel armed with tens or hundreds of smooth bore cannon into the sleek, deadly Dreadnought/Superdreadnought battleship.  In turn, I will examine some of those technological breakthroughs, and how they made the battleship possible.

1.  Propulsion  the screw propeller.

 Before its arrival, paddle wheels along the side or, less commonly, at the stern, where how steamships were propelled.  Almost the entirety of the paddlewheel and its drive mechanism is above the water, and thus vulnerable to enemy shellfire.  In addition, the large space dedicated to them prevented mounting guns to fire in those locations, or using the space to handle small boats or load fuel.

 In contrast the screw propeller is entirely below the water, as is the drive mechanism for it.  This means that the water itself functions as "armor" to protect it.  In addition, the rudder can be positioned close to it, which increases the effectiveness of the rudder.  Also, it is possible, at the lost of some efficiency, to craft a propeller that is directly driven by turbines -  more on that when we discuss powerplants.

2.  Powerplant - triple expansion reciprocating steam engines and turbines.

 Ever since Turbina burst upon the scene, the advantages of turbine propulsion were dramatically evident.  However, some of the shortcomings were less obvious.  For example, proper design and manufacture of suitable reduction gears to more efficiently turn a screw propeller at slower RPM took some time and advances in machining and material science.  This limited the efficiency of early turbine battleships as they tended to be equipped with direct-drive screws which sacrificed range and fuel economy for performance. There were further penalties, with turbine ships often being equipped with a "cruise" turbine and a "reverse" turbine to accomplish what a triple-expansion engine could do with valving.

  Interestingly the need for great range lead the United States to stay with triple-expansion engines far longer than the European powers, and accepting a lower top speed of approximately 18 knots for their "standard" battleships - this to enable fighting across the vast expanse of the Pacific.  It was in U.S. battleships that the triple-expansion steam engine reached its most evolved form, with automatic oiling and other features added to try to offset the limitations of the piston engines.  Also, when greater speeds and better damage control/compartmentability were desired, such as with the planned battlecruisers Lexington and Saratoga turbo-electric machinery was fitted.  It would not be until the last gasp of the naval limitation treaties in the U.S. until turbine machinery and higher speeds became the standard.

Next up - armor.

Armor started simply.  In the days of sail, sturdy oak timers were effectively the armor, due to the reduced tendency to splinter, compared to pine and fir.  As the size and power of cannon grew, iron chains, railroad rails, or boilerplate were used.  This lead to steel backed by several inches of teak, soon to be replaced by compound armor, where liquid steel was poured between a hardened steel face plate and a wrought iron backing plate.  Eventually, the "Harvey armor" process came about in the 1890s, wherein a slab of nickel steel had the outer face hardened by carborizing the surface by heating it under a layer of charcoal - for a week or so.  This resulted in a hardened layer on the outer 20% with the remainder remaining ductile and thus absorbing shock and catching splinters.   As refinements came about in the process of carborizing and annealing the plates, and also the exact metallurgy of the steel, this was refined into the Krupp/Vickers cemented armor used up through WWII.  11.5 inches of Harvey armor was equivalent to 15 inches of homogenous steel in shell resistance.  However, some parts of the ship armor, particularly those subjected to oblique impacts like lower belts and deck armor, began to be made of homogenous armor, as the cemented armor tended to suffer delamination from oblique impacts.

OP's avatar checks out.

Fuel -  

  In order to make the steam, you need to burn something.  Early on, wood gave way to coal as a more consistent, high density fuel.  Coal had the additional advantage in that it could be stored in bunkers just inside the hull, thus providing a relatively inert "spaced armor" right where hull penetrations from enemy shells were most likely.  

  However, coal also had some drawbacks - it largely had to be manually loaded into ship, and then manually shoveled into the boilers.  Once burned, the ash residue had to be manually shoveled out, and thence disposed.  This was all labor-intensive, so a big hunk of the crew was dedicated to dealing with the fuel.  All those crew members needed berthing space, food, sanitary facilities, etc.  All this meant that a substantial part of the ship had to be dedicated to that, instead of engines, armor, fuel storage, ammo, and guns.  Since the maximum size of the ship is limited by the existing infrastructure, such as dry-docks, piers, slipways, etc.  this had the secondary effect of limiting how effective these ships as war ships.  Also the endurance and number of the stokers available could, in some cases, limit the availability of top speeds, as the people shoveling simply tired out.

 Oil is an even denser fuel, energy wise.  Although the oil used in ship engines in the early days was "bunker oil", a heavy residual fuel left over from the refining process, it could, with the application of some heat, be pumped into storage tanks and from there, into the boilers themselves.  This reduced the amount of manpower, and thus space, that had to be dedicated to fuel handling.  While the loss of coal bunkers meant the loss of some "armor" effect, the oil, as well as boiler feed water, could occupy void spaces in the bottom of the hull, and thus be incorporated in the over-all torpedo defense scheme.  All this occurs just as the "automotive torpedo" becomes an increasingly longer-ranged and more deadly weapon.

  Originally, oil was sprayed on the coal in the boilers for a temporary boost in power.  Great Britain, being the pre-eminent naval power in the time of the battleship, had supplies of coal, but not oil.  This later drove the Brits to seek access to Middle East oil by supplanting the Ottoman Empire with "friendly" regimes, with repercussions that last until the present day.

  Increasingly, new construction, as well as refits of existing ships replaced coal fired boilers with oil burners.

guessing oil was also easier to refuel at sea, while moving ?

I was Army so I don't know shit

there was a big argument about which propulsion system was better:  paddle or screw propellor?  Two ships were tied to each other and eventually the screw propellor ship won.

the only advantage of the paddle ship (if it was side by side paddle; that is port & starboard paddles), is that it can spin 360 in place.

@Rick Oshay - you should really consider joining The International Naval Research Organization.

I will look into it.

I started going down this guy's youtube rabbit hole a year or so ago.

Much "easier" (relatively speaking - still very hard)  to pump oil at sea rather than try to move coal form ship to ship.  While I am not an expert, I think the first extensive effort to replenish coal-fired ships at sea was the Russian fleet circumnavigating the globe to fight (and lose) to the Japanese in 1895.  IIRC this involved putting the coal in canvas bags, transferring it to the receiving ship, and stowing it in the bunkers.  The empty bags would be returned to the supplying collier to repeat the trip.

  Oil burning battleships and aircraft carriers often had the additional duty of refueling their smaller escort vessels whilst under way.  The inability to do so lead to some of the ship loses Admiral Halsey experienced in his two typhoon encounters, as the destroyers and destroyer escorts had higher centers of gravity due to their light fuel load, and thus were more susceptible to capsizing.

Main gun propellant -

  In the beginning, thanks to the Chinese, there was black powder.  And for centuries, that is ALL there was.  The cannons were muzzle-loaders, and the nature of the powder limited the power of the guns.  Just packing more powder in meant you were likely to blow up the cast iron or brass cannons.  The pressure curve of the black powder could only be adjusted by varying the size of the flakes, and not by much.  This is why black powder cannons are relatively short - additional barrel length would only slow down the projectile!



100-ton Armstrong-Whitworth rifled muzzle-loading cannon.

 The fouling from firing black powder also presented an obstacle to developing breach-loading guns.  But then, one day there was smokeless powder!

 Wait a minute - there were some steps in between ...

  Enter "brown" or "cocoa" powder ...

 The history of cannon propellent is the quest for a slower burn and a higher specific impulse, to put more energy into the projectile, and thus greater range and terminal effects.  Hence "prismatic brown powder" or "slow-burning cocoa powder" which started with the basic chemistry of black powder, and modified it.  Instead of 10% sulfur, the fraction was reduced to 1 - 2% or eliminated completely.  Also instead of fully carbonized charcoal, incompletely carbonized charcoal from such sources as rye straw was used, which replaced the sulfur as an aid to ignition and as a binder, and had the further benefit of replacing the combustion product of sulfur dioxide with carbon dioxide, which boosted the specific impulse.  Where black powder was rolled into sheets, broken up, and the flakes screened for size, brown powder was hydraulically formed into "prisms" (hence the name) which resembled large wagon wheel nuts - either hexagonal or octagonal with a central hole.  With the slower burn rate and higher impule, gun barrels lengthened to take advantage of it, but brown powder shared the main drawback of black powder - incomplete combustion, smoke, and fouling.  The fouling, in particular, made it difficult or impossible to obtain high rates of fire with rifled bores and breech loading.

So - the French to the rescue. For some time nitrated cellulose in the form of cotton or wood fibers exposed to nitric and sulfuric acid had been used as a replacement propellant and low order explosive, and this, along with nitroglycerin became the modern 2 components in what would become known as "smokeless powder".  The French led the charge in 1884 with Poudre B(lanche), or "white powder" (actually gray-green).  Soon after Alfred Nobel patented in 1887 his "ballistite" composed of 10% camphor and equal parts nitroglycerine and collodion.  Meanwhile, a government committee in Great Britain, called the "Explosives Committee" and chaired by Sir Frederick Abel, monitored foreign developments in explosives. Abel and Sir James Dewar, who was also on the committee, jointly patented a modified form of ballistite in 1889. This consisted of 58% nitroglycerin by weight, 37% guncotton and 5% petroleum jelly. Using acetone as a solvent, it was extruded as spaghetti-like rods initially called "cord powder" or "the committee's modification of ballistite", but this was soon abbreviated to cordite.

  Residual acids form processing the guncotton, and the eventual evaporation of solvents such as alcohol and camphor tended to result in instable powder subject to spontaneous combustion, and several battleships were lost to explosions as all parties raced to invent better practices and additives.  However the lack of visible smoke was aboon during a time of optical fire control, and until the advent of RADAR in the early WWII era, the drive for propellant with less smoke and less flash (for fighting at night) would be a constant effort.  

 The reduced burn rates with smokeless powders made possible the long-barreled cannon with which 20th century battleships were equipped.



One of 9 16" 50 cal Mark 7 main battery cannons being fitted to USS Iowa

The reason why the Iowa's were retired is that the Zumwalts were to take over the place of shore bombardment. That never came to fruition...they should be serving today.

Yes.  For the cost of that boondoggle, and the worthless LCS, we could have had fully refit, partially automated Iowa class firing extended range and guided shells, but I guess you don't get board of director's gigs paying $300k by advocating retaining an existing system.

@Rick-o-shay.


Very well written summary!!!  Well done!

The ammunition -

  As armor became progressively better, the firepower of the guns struggled to increase to match, or over-match, the armor.  The spherical solid shot just wasn't cutting it any more.  As well, specialized shells designed to tear up rigging and set fire to wooden ships, such as rod shot, chain shot, hot shot, and explosive shell were rendered near useless by armor plate and steam power.  With the adoption of "smokeless" powder, the reduction in fouling made the adoption of breech-loading mechanisms and rifle more practicable.  With breach loading and rifling, it became possible to use shells more in the design of the minnie ball or modern artillery shells, with their higher sectional densities and profiles more conducive to penetration.  With higher velocities from longer barrels, these rounds largely used kinetic energy to batter their way through the new armors, with a relatively small "bursting" charge in the "armor piercing" rounds.  

 Let's look at more or less the final evolution of battleship ammunition: the shells for the Iowa class 16" Mark 7 gun.

AP Mark 8 Mods 0 to 8 - shell weight 2,700 lbs. (1,225 kg) bursting charge 40.9 lbs. (18.55 kg)

This was the "super-heavy" armor piercing round for the Iowas, and was reckoned to give up little, if any, to the Japanese 18.1 inch in terms of performance.  Clearly, the kinetic energy of impact was the primary producer of effects on the target.

        HC Mark 13 Mods 0 to 6 and HC Mark 14 - 1,900 lbs. (862 kg) bursting charge- 153.6 lbs. (69.67 kg)

This was the "High Capacity" or high explosive shell, and even here, its not that much explosive - kinetic energy still does much of the work.

Now, if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, you can look at the W23 nuclear shell, which appears to be the warhead from the Army 11" cannon inside a High Capacity shell body, and some of the planned sabot and SCRAMJET rounds that were in the works.

Much like advances in hardening and cementing the top layer of the armor, advances in heat-treating and hardening the front of the AP rounds were essential in improving the performance of the AP rounds.  However, it was a delicate balancing act - get the round TOO hard, and it could shatter on impact before defeating the armor - particularly so with an oblique impact.  Not hard enough, and the round would just splatter and not defeat the armor.
       

Thanks.  Still to come - gun mountings, fire control, the rise of the airplane and torpedo, secondary batteries,  "battlecruisers", "fast battleships", and more.

Interesting topic, good video!  I had absolutely no idea about early development of ironclads.

Well done

The man knows his history. So does OP.

Great posts, excited to read more.

Incidentally, I have a copy of "Castles of Steel" by Massie. I haven't read it yet, it's super long. OP what do you think of this book?

I've not read it.  Will be on the lookout for it.

Gun Mountings

 Believe it or not, it took a while to eventually decide how the main battery of a warship should be mounted.  With the higher pressures and greater size of the guns, clearly the idea of roller-based carriages and ropes to bring them back into battery would no longer work, even if this meant that dismounting the guns for use on land would no longer be practical.  Casement mountings, and various other ideas were tried, but it turned out that the turret, as seen on the USS Monitor, was the wave of the future, as it provided armor protection for the gun and its crew, as well as provided for freedom of rotation, and provided a path for recoil forces to transfer to the structure of the hull.  Add in hydraulic or pneumatic recoil recuperators, power elevation and shell handling systems, and the mounting of multiple guns in one turret, and voila!  The modern battleship turret is born.  

 A few details left to deal with, however, and they cross also with fire direction and even the ammunition involved.  For one, how much elevation should be provided to the guns?  Before the Russo-Japanese war naval warfare experts expected even main battery fire to be a close range direct-fire affair, but accurate long range Japanese fire at the Battle of Tushima, 27–28 May 1905 showed the primacy of 3 things:

1.  Larger guns firing at longer ranges, which enable you to hit and damage the enemy earlier in the engagement.
2.  The advantage of centralized fire control over a local gun captain in each turret controlling fire, and ...
3.   The advantage that good range-finding and early mechanical fire control computers could give when properly used.

  Yes, those are largely fire control issues - however, to fire at longer ranges, greater elevation was needed in the gun mounts.  As fire control continued to be improved, and accurate fire at longer distances became practical, the amount of elevation built into the mounts increased.  Early "dreadnoughts" (more on that term later) often had elevations of 15 degrees or so for their 12" and 13.5" guns.  Most of those were scrapped after WWI due to naval limitation treaties - the "super dreadnoughts" retained in service usually had their gun mounts modified to double their maximum elevation to 30 degrees.  The final battleships produced, such as the Iowas, typically had maximum elevations of 45 degrees.

 As to the ammunition and propellant, when you are trying to chunk a 2700 pound shell 23 nautical miles, every slight variation introduces inaccuracies.  As maximum range increased, greater measures had to be taken to ensure round-to-round uniformity.  Most navies added bags of die to their shells to designate the firing ship, so that in a fleet action, observers could identify their particular ship's shell splashes from the color and correctly adjust their fire on target.

     USS Iowa - Orange
     USS New Jersey - Blue
     USS Missouri - Red
     USS Wisconsin - Green

An underweight shell would have additional bags of dye added to bring it up to the nominal weight.  The zenith of long range accuracy was achieved by the Iowas in the twilight of their careers through 3 means:

1.  Every main gun built for the U.S. Navy since the late 1930's was chromium lined to extend barrel life and thus delayed gun wear from affecting velocity.
2.  The guns were fitted with delay coils of various values which delayed the firing of the turret's guns with respect to each other - this reduced dispersion caused by shells being influenced by the wake of adjacent shells.
3.  Additional wear reduction measures included the addition of a polyurethane jacket over the powder bags and a packet of "Swedish additive" (titanium dioxide and wax) further reduced liner wear and thus round-to-round velocity variation.
4.  "As modernized in the 1980s, each turret carried a DR-810 radar that measured the muzzle velocity of each gun, which made it easier to predict the velocity of succeeding shots. Together with the Mark 160 FCS and better propellant consistency, these improvements made these weapons into the most accurate battleship-caliber guns ever made. For example, during test shoots off Crete in 1987, fifteen shells were fired from 34,000 yards (31,900 m), five from the right gun of each turret. The pattern size was 220 yards (200 m), 0.64% of the total range. 14 out of the 15 landed within 250 yards (230 m) of the center of the pattern and 8 were within 150 yards (140 m). Shell-to-shell dispersion was 123 yards (112 m), 0.36% of total range."

source:  http://navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_16-50_mk7.php

Tag

R K Massie

I believe that the destroyers had the ability to pump water into their fuel tanks to help maintain their center of gravity.  Pretty common technology at the time.  The reason that the destroyers were lost was that they ran out of fuel and lost headway.  My father was in the two typhoons that Halsey sailed into.  He served on the USS Washington (BB56).  He never liked Halsey after that.  Senseless loss of lives in his opinion.  

For my parents 40th wedding anniversary we wanted to send them on a cruise.  My father flat out refused to go.  He had always talked about how much he loved it at sea.  When questioned further, he replied that he had been in two typhoons in the Pacific and five major storms in the north Atlantic.  He had seen waves "over 100 feet tall".   He never  wanted go anywhere near anything like that ever again and was certainly not going to expose his wife to the possibility.  When I mentioned modern weather tracking etc his reply was "Ever hear of a rogue wave?"  and that was that.

Probably not.  First the biggest part of total ownership cost is crews, which strangely when Congress buys a new ship they normally don’t provide funds for.  And second, anyone who has never worked with the Navy may not under stand the incredible cost siphoned off by its bureaucracy and what is jokingly called the NAVSEA tax which leads to simple tasks costing significantly more than you would think.  Even something as simple as removing the guns from the Zumwalts cost in the order of $500M, now just image how much it would cost upgrade 1930-40 technology

Tag

One other thing about coal - it's a fucking mess to deal with.  When coaling, a ship had to button up every door and window lest coal dust get everywhere.  Even when they did, coal dust got in everywhere.  Ships coaled, then they cleaned.  I doubt there was ever a sailor who was sorry to see coal go.

tag

Coal is also mildly corrosive. The cleaning wasn’t for appearance.

Another good naval history channel to watch  https://www.youtube.com/c/DrAlexanderClarke/featured

Eagerly awaiting more!

Isn’t aerosolized coal dust highly explosive as well?


ETA- awesome write up OP!

Yes


That’s how it’s combusted in a coal fired boiler. It’s pre dried, sent to a ball mill and blown into the fire ball of the furnace.

Controlled dust explosion.

Some types of coal, like Powder River Basin, are very volatile as well. Any electrical equipment congruent to the coal handling equipment must be intrinsically safe.

Tagged for later!

Attached File

OST eagerly anticipating additions

My uncle served on the ALABAMA during the war.

And it burns of course, impregnating every surface with coal dust was a fire hazard.  Many Russian ships at Tsushima burned vigorously from coal dust and piles of full coal bags lying about catching fire.  The Japanese used contact fused high explosive shells filled with "Shimose powder", a picric acid explosive that produced more heat than other high explosives of the day which thus ignited more fires.  The Russian gunners were quickly killed or driven off the decks away from their guns by the fires, making it easy for the Japanese to overwhelm them.

Royal Navy AP shells were being produced too brittle before WWI and they didn't realize it until they started shattering in combat.  Took a couple years to use up/replace the bad ones, IIRC.

The Beginning, Part 1

   As preciously explained, the term "battleship" descends to us from the days of sail, when opposing fleets would form a "line of battle" and sail parallel to each other blazing away at each other with full broadsides.  Thus a warship optimized to participate in these activities, at the expense of maneuverability, endurance, and other qualities was a "line of battle ship", or "battleship".  

  However, the bulk of my postings deal with ships of the Dreadnought type, or later,  So - how do we get to that point?

  The guns themselves, and their mountings, along with their turrets, if so fitted, are among the most expensive components of a warship, and have the longest lead times.  Indeed, for quite some time, many nations were unable to fabricate large naval guns and were forced to buy them from private companies such as Armstrong, Vickers, Bethlehem Steel, Krupp, etc. in nations that had the industrial infrastructure to support the creation of the components of the various types of large guns.

  This, after sail had given way to coal, and after oak timbers were replaced by face-hardened cemented armor, but BEFORE the arrival of Dreadnought herself, the pre-dreadnought battleships almost all carried a mixed armament, with the largest and most modern weapons aboard often being new construction, but others frequently removed from older decommissioned ships or wherever they could be sourced.  Remember, due to the limitations of individual battery fire control, poor optics, and limited elevation it was thought naval gun battles would be close range affairs - at least, until the Japanese performance at the Battle of Tushima demonstrated otherwise.

So, most commonly, the "Main battery" was 2 2-gun turrets of usually 12" guns mounted on the center line, although some navies preferred a smaller main gun with a higher rate of fire.  Typically, these were the only guns mounted that could be relied upon to penetrate the armor of an enemy battleship protecting the engines, magazines, etc.

  Next, a secondary battery of "quick-firing" guns of from 4 to 9.4 inch bore was fitted.  These guns fired single-piece ammo and so were quick to load and fire.  Their job was to wreck the unarmored parts of enemy battleships, or to engage enemy cruisers, destroyers, and motor torpedo boats.  These could also be fitted in turrets, but more commonly were in "casements" just below and along the edges of the decks, or in open, unprotected mounts on the decks where there was space.

  The U.S. Navy led the way to adopting an "intermediate" battery, as a way of packing more firepower punch into the ship, primarily for use against enemy battleships, so these were 8 to 10 inch guns.


HMS Agamemnon, an example of taking the intermediate battery principle to its ultimate expression with ten 9.2-inch guns

 The intermediate battery concept kind of fell out of favor.  It had a brief resurgence just as the first dreadnoughts were laid down, and so these ships were obsolete when they were commissioned.

  The tertiary battery consisted from 3 inch guns down to rapid-fire machine guns.  The job of these guns were to rake the decks of enemy battleships that got close enough, and to engage smaller craft.  Later, as Zeppellins and aircraft became a threat, they had to deal with those as well.

  Lastly, as the torpedo became a feared weapon against the battleship, so too the battleships began to be fitted with them - usually one or more pairs of tubes firing forward, either above, or below the waterline.  Some of the dreadnoughts had this as well, but over time they were removed and the space so dedicated re-used for other purposes.  We'll discuss torpedoes more later.

Range of combat
During the ironclad age, the range of engagements increased; in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95 battles were fought at around 1 mile (1.5 km), while in the Battle of the Yellow Sea in 1904, the Russian and Japanese fleets fought at ranges of 3.5 miles (5.5 km).[19] The increase in engagement range was due in part to the longer range of torpedoes, and in part to improved gunnery and fire control. In consequence, shipbuilders tended towards heavier secondary armament, of the same calibre that the "intermediate" battery had been; the Royal Navy's last pre-dreadnought class, the Lord Nelson class, carried ten 9.2-inch guns as secondary armament. Ships with a uniform, heavy secondary battery are often referred to as "semi-dreadnoughts"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-dreadnought_battleship#Main_battery

End of Part 1

The evolution of just the structures and armor of battleships is amazing, and fascinating.  
I forget who, but one of the members here posted some detailed PDF's of a Missouri class (IIRC) BB, and the scale took a while to soak in.
I'm used to tracked armor.

Then I realize I am looking at "Spaced, laminate armor" with layers of steel, airspace(deadspace?) and seawater, better measured in "Yards" than "Millimeters".

Did the 16" (or hell, any of the big naval rifles) experiment with RAP /Rocket Assist Projectiles or simple base burn/fumer projectiles?
And was there any efforts toward area ruled shells to extend range?

I enjoyed it. Unfortunately had to toss it and many others after my place flooded.

Attached File

Crazy what a percentage of the worlds defense budgets were spent on battleships, only to turn out they weren’t particularly useful.

Wait til you discover "Forts". By the time they were able to be functional, tactics and technology made them very obsolete.

I remember reading once that the reason for doing away with the large caliber secondary guns in the Dreadnoughts was that at fighting distances, a splash from a 8-10" shell was virtually indistinguishable from that of a 12" shell. Since range was found and fall of shot corrected by observing the splashes, it was harder for each battery to get on target.


Oh, and tagged

The Beginning - Part 2

  So ranges of naval combat have been increasing - from 1 mile to now 3.5 miles, due to fear of torpedoes, as well as fire control and gunnery improvements making it possible to try to actually HIT the enemy at the longer ranges.

  This leads to three things:
1.  Improvements in consistency and quality of fire control, ammunition, propellants, and the gun tubes themselves, to even further improve the chance of long range hits.
2.  The modification of existing gun mounts, and the design of new gun mounts, with greater elevation wring longer range out of the guns.
3.  The creep of the secondary battery to fuse with the "tertiary battery" as more uniform "assistant main battery" guns, to get more weight of effective firepower against heavily armored opponents.  This is what we say in Part 1 led to the "semi-dreadnoughts".

 As you can imagine, with all these different guns blazing away at the same time, adjusting fire became a nightmare, especially at the longer ranges everyone was trying to fight at.  Was that splash a "main battery" splash, or an "intermediate battery" splash, or was it even from our ship???  Should we tell the smaller guns to hold their fire until we see the big gun splashes?  This got worse and worse as maximum combat ranges continued to push out to the then-incredible range of 6 miles, which meant it took loner and longer to observe splash.  Eventually, the bright idea came about to do away with all these different batteries, and build an "all big gun" ship with a large number of a uniform caliber of main gun, backed up with a smaller secondary battery to deal with motor torpedo boats, destroyers, and other such riff-raff that otherwise might spoil a splendid battleship vs. battleship scrimmage.  The first fellow to put this idea to paper was an Italian named Vittorio Cuniberti.  In 1903 he articulated in print the concept of an all-big-gun battleship. When the Italian Navy did not pursue his ideas, Cuniberti wrote an article in Jane's Fighting Ships advocating his concept. 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).  

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_

The Japanese battleship Satsuma was laid down as an all-big-gun battleship, five months before Dreadnought, but gun shortages allowed her to be equipped with only four of the twelve 12-inch guns that had been planned.(Remember that bit I said about guns being a long lead-time item?  Rick-OShay) [7] The Americans began design work on an all-big-gun battleship around the same time in 1904, but progress was leisurely and the two South Carolina-class battleships were not ordered until March 1906, five months after Dreadnought was laid down, and the month after she was launched.

 This left the Navy of Rum, Sodomy, And The Lash, in the person of Admiral Sir John "Jacky" Fisher, First Sea Lord of the Board of Admiralty, {remember this name, it will pop up again later}  to launch the first all-big-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought,  Dreadnought 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. 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. 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.  Even this early, Fisher wanted to get this ship into service as soon as possible - efforts were made to standardize the hull plates and simplify to internal structure to speed construction, and although I cannot prove it, there are rumors that guns and turrets intended for the current "semi-dreadnoughts" being constructed at the time were diverted to complete HMS Dreadnought and her immediate follow-on dreadnoughts more quickly.  (Remember that bit I said about guns being a long lead-time item?  Rick-OShay)



Dreadnought was a singleton - she named not a class of ships, but an entire type - the "dreadnought battleship".  A true game-changer, she displaced 18120 tons at normal load, and over 20000 tons deep load.  527 feet long, 82 feet wide, drawing 29 feet of water.  Dreadnought was the first battleship to use turbines in place of the older reciprocating triple-expansion steam engines.[22] She had two paired sets of Parson direct-drive turbines, each of which drove two 8-foot-10-inch (2.7 m) diameter, three-bladed propellers using steam provided by 18 Babcock & Wilcox boilers that had a working pressure of 250 psi (1,724 kPa; 18 kgf/cm2). The turbines, rated at 23,000 shaft horsepower (17,000 kW), were intended to give a maximum speed of 21 knots; the ship reached 21.6 knots (40.0 km/h; 24.9 mph) from 27,018 shp (20,147 kW) during her sea trials on 9 October 1906.

 When she went into service, the "dreadnought era" began, (and Martin Musical Instrument Co. began marketing large "dreadnought" guitars ..."

Dude, we can be friends.

 Just as the ascendency of the aircraft carrier is not due to the ships themselves, but the increasing capabilities of the aircraft they "fired" at the enemy  (more on this later, Rick-OShay), the eclipse of the battleship is largely due to the fact that they continued to fire (only slightly improved) WWI era shells.  

  In addition, it is my opinion only (feel free to disagree) that the American decision to delay fielding the proximity/VT fuse for fear of compromising the technology to the enemy increased the battleship's vulnerability to air attack for too long, needlessly.  Not until the kamikaze scourge in the Pacific was the VT fuse authorized for use in that theater.

 When the battleship New Jersey was activated to provide naval gunfire support during the Viet Nam War, it became increasingly apparent that throwing 1 or more officers with 15 millions of dollars in training in a 50 million dollar airplane at the Communists in order to drop a 500 pound bomb on them had some costs that weren't readily apparent at first examination - news real footage of pilots in prisoner of war camps, lawn-darting expensive aircraft into rice paddies due to SAM and AAA fire, and also nearly losing the carriers themselves, as almost happened with fires aboard the USS Forrestal and USS Enterprise.









 This is not to disparage the brave men who fought those fires & saved their ship, or the brave men that bored in on their assigned targets despite the tracers & missiles rising up to greet them - but the bean counters and even the Navy itself figured out that the more of these targets that could  be serviced by naval gunfire, the less risk and expense we would run.

 This is why the New Jersey was activated, & why the old heavy cruisers with the automatic 8 inch guns were on the gun line.  But what if they could reach even further inland?  Even more targets could be handled without risking pilots and airplanes!

 To that end the Navy explored fitting sabots to the conventional 11" shells intended for the recently-decommissioned "Atomic Annie" style M65 atomic cannon and firing them out of the 16" 50 cal Mark 7 naval gun.



http://navweaps.com/Weapons/WNUS_16-50_mk7.php
In the spring or summer of 1967 when USS New Jersey (BB-62) was being activated for Vietnam, Indian Head Naval Ordnance Station proposed taking 23,000 non-nuclear 280 mm (11") shells left over from the Army's "atomic cannon" program and converting them via a sabot and obturator to be used in 16" (40.6 cm) guns. This was apparently a part of or in conjunction with the "Gunfighter" program for developing Long Range Bombardment Ammunition (LRBA) projectiles. Test shots were fired in 1968 and 1969 at Yuma and at Barbados, with the latter location using two 16"/45 (40.6) cm guns welded end-to-end and achieving ranges out to 83,850 yards (76,670 m) with a 745 lbs. (338 kg) shell fired at a muzzle velocity of 4,550 fps (1,387 mps). (actual range form an Iowa class would probably be somewhat less - Rick-OShay) The program was apparently halted when New Jersey was decommissioned in 1969. A photograph of the disassembled saboted round is shown below. During the 1980s deployment, an investigation was undertaken to consider converting 280 mm projectiles into cargo rounds carrying about 300 sub-munitions, but no prototypes were constructed.



During the 1980s reactivation there was some consideration to building SCRAMJET propelled rounds for the main guns - http://www.combatreform.org/battleships.htm  will take you to an article discussing the technology.  My failing memory says it was about a 200 mile range with a 200 pound warhead, or about the same payload as the 8 inch howitzer shell.  If precision guided via designator or GPS, that is nothing to sneeze at, especially 9 at a time.

Not so crazy when you look at what it cost Germany to lose 2 world wars.

Yes.  See below.  Err ... above I mean.