Warships and their story

by R. A. Fletcher

Photograph by Stephen Cribb, Southsea.

H.M. SUPER-DREADNOUGHT “COLOSSUS.”

Photograph by Stephen Cribb, Southsea.

The Orion has about 2,000 tons more displacement than the Neptune, and this has enabled her to carry the heavier guns. She has one elevated tripod mast which is provided with wireless telegraphy apparatus. Her two funnels are of more than usual height, and steam is generated in a series of water-tube boilers. To summarise, by way of contrast, the armament arrangement of these ships, it may be said that the Dreadnought, the three Bellerophons, and the three St. Vincents have six 12-inch guns in three turrets on the middle line of the ship, and two in a turret on either wing. The Neptune, Colossus, and Hercules have their wing turrets en echelon, so that ten guns can be trained on either side. The Orions have all their guns on the centre line of the ship. Which of these systems is the best has been keenly debated. Experiments in gun-fire are being carried out to ascertain it, but the true test can only be warfare, and even then much will depend on the circumstances of the battle and on the men behind the guns.

The Hercules was the first of her class to be given only one mast. Of the centre-line turrets, one is forward and the other two are aft, and of these two the foremost can fire over that aft of it. This arrangement of the turrets makes it possible for ten of these immense guns to be fired on either broadside. There are also twenty 4-inch quick-firers and three submerged 21-inch torpedo tubes. Her maximum coal capacity is 2,700 tons and she can also carry oil fuel in her double bottom. She is a sister vessel to the Neptune and Colossus. These three vessels are protected against attack by aerial warships.

Like all the rest of the Dreadnoughts, the Neptune was constructed in unusually quick time, only two years elapsing from the laying of the keel until she was ready for being commissioned. She has been described as a 30 per cent. improvement on the Dreadnought, but the rapidity of her construction made her a cheaper vessel than the other, her cost per ton of displacement working out at £86.85, as against £101.29 for the Dreadnought.

The Monarch took the water with a launching weight of about 11,500 tons, a record for a warship, after having been just a year on the stocks. This weight included the main structure, the boilers, funnels, funnel uptakes, casings, and a large quantity of auxiliary machinery and armour. Her eighteen boilers weighed 23 tons each, and her two funnels, which are 53 feet high above the upper deck, weigh 18 tons apiece. The deck-houses and bridges were also in place, and she was in other respects in a forward condition. The whole of the work was carried out in 220 working days. This shows what can be done in the private ship-building yards of this country. Builders of warships now find it more economical to put as much work as possible into the hull before launching it, modern dockyard methods rendering this comparatively easy. A great boiler is raised bodily and lifted into position without trouble, and even items weighing 20 to 30 tons or more are lifted and deposited where wanted with no more trouble than if they weighed so many hundredweights.

Mention has been made in earlier pages of such splendid vessels as the Hood, Trafalgar, Nile and Royal Sovereign, all of which in their day, not so long past, were considered to be unsurpassed, and by some to be unsurpassable. Their fighting efficiency is as great as the day they were launched, yet these and many others, equally good vessels, have been removed from the list of the Navy as obsolete and ere long will retire ingloriously to the scrap-heap. All these vessels have been launched since 1890, and however much one may deplore that such fine ships should be discarded, there is no denying that they are hopelessly outclassed by the Dreadnoughts, and that a dozen of them would not be a match for one of the latest Orions. Yet more than one of them was hailed as the last word in battleships, and there were some who asserted that they would prove to be the last big armoured ships to be built, as torpedo craft and protected cruisers would constitute the navies of the future. But that prophecy was made before the Battle of Tsushima was fought, and the lessons it taught were learnt.

Protests by naval men against the relegation of these ships to the lists of the useless have been frequent, and it has been contended that some of these fine old battleships could have been sent to the Colonies to act as harbour-defence vessels. But the Colonies have shown no disposition to be satisfied with anything under the best that money can buy, and they have contended that if a ship be out of date it is no use to them, especially as any hostile power sending a ship out against them would probably send one of the best and newest and most powerful.