Talk:HMS Dreadnought (1906)

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"Although the battlecruiser concept would become unpopular in the aftermath of World War I, Fisher was nonetheless forced by the Admiralty to create an all-big-gun battleship instead."

Huh? I don't see the relation between battlecruiser popularity and fisher creating "an all-big-gun battleship instead." --Aqua 07:27, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

Contents

[edit] HMS Cobra

This page says HMS Cobra sank in 1899. The HMS Cobra page says it was launched in 1899 but wrecked in 1901. Does anyone know which is correct? --86.130.213.104 12:36, 26 August 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Battery

The article said:

"sailing vessels. Not only did this limit the amount of long-range firepower to four guns, it also allowed water into the ship through the many openings nearer the waterline."

I rewrote. It wasn't a limit on range that was the issue so much as the distribution; broadside batteries (typical before turrets) could only be used on one broadside, where turrets opened wide fields of fire, & both broadsides--with half the number of guns. This flaw was allowed to persist in Dreadnought, to an extent, with her barbetted secondary armament, & two wing turrets; the spec box needs cleanup for calling them "midships": a midships (P, Q, or X) turret would not be masked by superstructure, while both Dreadnought's wing turrets were.

On a separate point, can somebody clarify when director firing was introduced? It's implied Dreadnought used it; as I recall, it wasn't introduced until after she was, sometime in the '10s or '20s.

Re the spec box, it needs cleanup in the "fate" category, too: seems to me that should include yr struck, yr decommissioned, yr scrapped, &/or yr sunk, as appropriate, in one category.

Trekphiler 14:42 & Trekphiler 15:21, 4 December 2005 (UTC)

I also remember reading reading somewhere that Dreadnnought did not have central fire control when introduced. This seems strange. David R. Ingham 01:32, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

HMS Dreadnought did not receive director firing until the First World War - she was the least suitable of all the dreadnoughts due to her age for undergoing the expensive and time consuming addition of the director. --Harlsbottom 20:23, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "In effect, the Dreadnought's concept was equal to three or more battleships in "real" firepower during combat."

This is comparing to a ship like Hood with two big guns forward and two aft, isn't it? It says "four". So that should read "equal to one and a half or two battleships" shouldn't it? David R. Ingham 01:28, 20 July 2006 (UTC)

Three or more is an exaggeration, I suppose, but 2-3 would be accurate. She could fire six guns right forward and eight broadside. A pre-dreadnought could fire two guns right forward and four broadside. TomTheHand 01:55, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
And it is much easier to range in larger salvos than smaller ones. So I think the sentence could stand.--Stephan Schulz 02:11, 20 July 2006 (UTC)
Just to clarify, Dreadnought could not fire six guns forward. The damage done to the superstructure by the inner tubes of 'P' and 'Q' turret would have been too great. Dreadnoughts were not designed or intended to be used in the 'chase' role, hence the parallel development of the battlecruiser. At the time of Dreadnought's launch, salvo firing and getting the range was still very much a developing "art", but generally more than four guns is necessary for good spotting. --Harlsbottom 20:23, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Speed

The article said:

"design speed of a steady 21 knots (39 km/h). This would allow her to outrun any combat ship then afloat, making her largely immune to mass attacks by an enemy fleet, or by smaller but deadly craft such as torpedo boats and submarines (HMS Viper and HMS Cobra had maximum speeds approaching 34 knots (63 km/h), but both sank in 1899)."

I rewrote. To begin with, it's irrelavent if RN ships sank, & frankly, if any DDs sank; it's not like there would never be any more built. The issue, put colloquially, is "be able to outrun anything you can't outgun, & outgun everything else". Dreadnought did that. She did it so well, she redefined "battleship". Trekphiler 15:07, 4 December 2005 (UTC)


In a related matter, the article says the Dreadnought had geared turbines. Since the first successful turbine gearset wasn't invented until, I believe, 1912, that seems impossible. They were direct drive turbines, as I recall. Will check before editing the article though. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 208.191.55.135 (talk) 02:55, 15 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Concussion

The mention of an unfounded fear of concussion links to Concussion, which is about head injuries, not anything related to big guns... please clarify :-) --AlanH 19:06, 30 April 2006 (UTC)

A point to be noted in connection with the question of concussion - due to a glaring omission made by the Director of Naval Ordnance not long after the launch of Dreadnought, Captain John Jellicoe (as he then was), every Royal Navy capital ship from Dreadnought to (but not including) Hood had their sighting hoods located on top of the turret. Including monitor turrets that works out to 218 twin turrets. Due to the position of the sighting hoods it meant that superfiring turrets from Orion to Ramillies could not fire within at least 30 degrees of the axis, otherwise the spotters in the turrets below would have suffered concussion from the blast. --Harlsbottom 02:54, 9 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Proposed Split

Would anyone object to splitting this article in two? What I'm imagining is that the Dreadnought article itself would deal only with the ship, and a new article on the development of Dreadnought-style battleships is created to handle sections lke those on Japanese developments would be created - something like Dreadnought (naval warfare) (although maybe this could be incorporated into the Battleship article...). I think this would have the advantage of streamlining this article, while at the same time not sacrificing any important material. Any thoughts? Carom 17:05, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

Well, call it dreadnought battleship for a start as its a natural phrase which would lend itself to easy linking without piping. it would also then get a {{main}} from here and "Battleship#dreadnought" GraemeLeggett 21:25, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
Should add that dreadnought battleship just redirects to battleship at the moment.GraemeLeggett 21:28, 5 December 2006 (UTC)
I suggested a split in the peer review the other day. I still think that a lot of content would be better off in a Development of the dreadnought battleship article. --Harlsbottom 08:50, 6 December 2006 (UTC)
But such an article name smacks of OR whereas by starting out with what defines a dreadnought battleship you can put in the context of its development and what follows. Another suggestion would be "history of the dreadnought battleship" as with History of the tank. GraemeLeggett 09:47, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

"History of..." sounds better, especially when compared to other weapons. --Harlsbottom 13:59, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Ok, per the discussion above, I think I'll create a new article, entitled Dreadnought battleship (or maybe Dreadnought (battleship) which will get the bulk of the information on the history and development of the type. this article and the Battleship article will have {{main}} redirects to this new article (which means I'll also cut down some of the info in the Battleship article. Unless anyone has a problem with that, I'll go ahead this weekend. Carom 20:28, 8 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Career

I have retitled the section describing Dreadnought's career, and cleared up a few misconceptions. In particular:

  • Dreadnought was not significantly slower than the "super-Dreadnoughts"
  • The 12-pdr guns were not later additions, but part of the original design.
  • Dreadnought could not posibly have been considered obsolete in 1910, since not a single "super-Dreadnought" was in service in any navy at that date.

Some tidying-up is needed, which I will attend to in the next few days.

Regards to all, John Moore 309 23:11, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Section Technology

"Thus protected from smaller ships, lighter guns that would normally be placed along the sides of the ship to deal with them could be omitted."

I don't understand the reasoning. How was the Dreadnought protected from smaller (supposedly faster) ships? Asking another way, if medium guns were used for protection against smaller faster ships (eg. torpedo boats), how was the Dreadnought supposed to protect herself?

[edit] Dreadnought

How much of the 'genesis' and 'technology' sections need be here, and how much at Dreadnought? Don't know the answer, but there is little point the two articles being a fork of one another. The Land 17:53, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Ideally a substantial amount of 'genesis' on Japan and the USA could be done away with, and the British development part expanded (a task for me in the next day or two I think). Most of the 'technology' section is relevent to the ship itself, but could be cleaned up I suppose. --Harlsbottom 18:14, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
That would be lovely. The Land 20:12, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
I've just realised the section on Cuniberti needs kicking out. Fisher's thoughts predate it (which I will elaborate on) anyway, and Cuniberti's proposed vessel referred to a ship which would fire at point-blank range (3,000 yards), and not the long ranges for which the dreadnoughts were principally designed. Comment? --Harlsbottom 21:32, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
Worth keeping Cuniberti in, even if rewritten to say exactly why he's not as important as people think! Woudl be itnerested to know what your sources are, by the way. The Land 09:54, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

I'm using Parkes' British Battleships - some would call it the definitive tome on the subject (696 pages) - it's a very good general overview. It quotes at length from Cuniberti's Janes article and I'll quote the relevent section in the draft I'm working on, which can be seen here; User:Harlsbottom/HMS Dreadnought (1906). --Harlsbottom 10:03, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

DK Brown (in Warrior to Dreadnought) makes it clear that Fisher was a late convert to the all-big-gun concept. At the time of Cuniberti's article, he seems not to have moved on from the line that he was promoting in the 1890's of "the largest possible small gun and the smallest possible large gun", which is the exact opposite of the dreadnought concept. Fisher or no Fisher, it was inevitable that the RN would build an all-big-gun ship once the USN had committed itself to the South Carolinas. Brown also believes the Cuniberti had little direct influence on RN thinking, but may have contributed to the international trend towards the all-big-gun concept that the "Dreadnought" was designed to anticipate. As for Parkes, I would not call it "definitive", though it is certainly monumental; it is safer to rely on more modern sources such as Conway's and Brown. John Moore 309 16:11, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
There is also a wodge of recent Dreadnought scholarship centered around Jon Tetsuro Sumida.... let me see if I have anything in my collected PDFs which is useful when I get back home. The Land 16:15, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
I am also somewhat wary of Fisher's claim to have pre-empted Cuniberti (since he claimed it in his memoirs), however I am convinced that Cuniberti was barking up the wrong tree in 1903. Unfortunately I don't have my copy of Warrior to Dreadnought or Brown's article on the design and conception of Dreadnought. Anyway, hence the reason I'm working on a user page and not the main article.
As to Sumida, his work ought to be referred to with trepidation. His recent "A Matter of Timing" bordered on the side of pure conjecture. His earlier "In Defence of Naval Supremacy", while an excellent study of the Edwardian navy is suspect in certain respects technically. --Harlsbottom 16:56, 27 June 2007 (UTC)
Sounds like there's enough accessible material for us to be able to cover the historiography in the article - not something which often happens in military history articles :-) The Land 18:22, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

Well, I've finally been re-acquainted with my copy of Warrior to Dreadnought as well as Brown's article on the Design and Construction of Dreadnought. I wouldn't say that Fisher was a late convert to the all-big-gun ship, for he definitely started having ideas drawn up in 1902, albeit with 10-inch guns. And then there's the 8 16-inch gunned Inflexible vessel which he and Watts briefly opined upon in 1881 as illustrated by John Roberts in a 1979 issue of Warship.

Anyway, I am trying to make my draft less-Fisher-centric - it has been updated accordingly. Considering the weight of materiel - I have yet to scour my Sumida, Lambert, and Brooks articles - would it be too much to suggest an article series for this if I accumulate enough referenced materiel? I'm thinking "Development of the battleship HMS Dreadnought", "Armament of the battleship HMS Dreadnought", "Construction and Career of the battleship HMS Dreadnought". Comments? --Harlsbottom 19:27, 4 July 2007 (UTC)

Yes--try going to graduate school. Wikipedia is not meant to be the place for original synthesis scholarship, or historiographic treatments based upon your (self-described) amateur sense of what is and what isn't proper history. It's supposed to be an encyclopedia--a distillation of accepted material. If you attempt to write up a serious entry while also labeling some of the sources you'll be drawing upon as "pure conjecture," (as you did above) then you're leaving yourself wide open for major revision by those who actually know something about this--like any postgraduate student studying military history at Oxford or Cambridge. If you want to do this and be taken seriously, then send it off to a real journal and get real credit for it. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 24.33.141.248 (talk • contribs) 03:18, 2 August 2007.
Setting aside its discourteous tone, the argument of the previous (unsigned) post is absurd. If Wikipedia is "a distillation of accepted material", then obviously you don't need to be an academic to contribute to it. It is improbable that a "postgraduate student studying military history at Oxford or Cambridge" would know more about HMS Dreadnought than Harlsbottom does, unless he happened to specialise in this subject; and if he did, and had derived his greater knowledge from original research, he would be violating core policy by using Wikipedia as a medium of publication. Finally, why should it be a problem if our edits are revised by someone who knows more about the subject than we do - and is able to source "accepted material" for his changes? Isn't that how the project is supposed to work? Regards to all, John Moore 309 12:18, 2 August 2007 (UTC)
This doesn't seem to be an absurd point. Harlsbottom proposed a series of articles on aspects of the Dreadnought. Do we really need separate articles on the development, the construction, the armament and then the career of the ship? Shouldn't those be sections within the original article? Moore seems to have misread the comment as a claim that only professional historians should be writing this stuff, but how do any of us know how accurate any of these historians really are? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Raistlan55 (talk • contribs) 03:25, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
The whole point of providing inline citations on Wikipedia, quite apart from providing a source for interested parties to read, is to allow a measure of verifiabilty. The rules on "No Original Research" prevent editors from refuting any published historians if they are found to be inaccurate - which isn't uncommon. However, the only way round that is to find an opposing point in print or get yourself published. How do any of us know how accurate any of it is? By reading as much as possible and judging it on its merits. Hence my intransigent attitude over at Frederic Dreyer.
The previous commenter made absolutely no reference to my proposal on an article series, therefore I'm not sure where you're coming from in that respect. No one here is disputing the importance of the Dreadnought in history I am sure. The fact that the genesis of the ship in the Royal Navy was surprisingly long and detailed warrants an article of its own given its importance, and the fact that many details are too Anglo-specific to be listed on the Dreadnought article. As to an article on the armament of the Dreadnought, see the featured article Armament of the Iowa class battleship, which proves it's possible for what is hardly the most significant ship armament in history. Considering how fast Dreadnought was built and the extent of her career an article on those two aspects could be comprehensive and run to a great number of sourced Kbs fairly easily. Harlsbottom (talk) 07:33, 10 April 2008 (UTC)
I think there is enough material out there for an article series in the fullness of time. There is a separate article about the armament of the Iowas, for instance. However I'd advie you to start with one main article for the time being! The Land 20:42, 4 July 2007 (UTC)
Well, that was lucky. I almost thought that was The Land who made the above comment. If you actually read my previous post I was stating that a work by an author connected to Dreadnought historiography, not actually on Dreadnought, bordered on pure conjecture. My interest in this subject is the fact that to my knowledge nobody in the last ten years has produced a new summary of the development of the all-big-gun ship in the Royal Navy, the last person being D.K. Brown with Warrior to Dreadnought. Note the fact that any chages I have made to this article I have referenced to the best of my recollection, and that any major changes would be made once I complete a draft article and have it thoroughly vetted by my knowledgable peers on Wikipedia. The multiple comments above are a testament to the fact that accuracy is being striven for here. --Harlsbottom 19:31, 2 August 2007 (UTC)

Another remark: Maybe I'm blind, but do we link from this article to Dreadnought? --Stephan Schulz (talk) 21:58, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

We do now. The Land (talk) 22:06, 28 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Paragraph on subdivision of hull

A paragraph states that "Another major innovation was the elimination of longitudinal passageways between compartments below the main deck level. While doors connecting compartments were always closed during combat, connected compartments had been found to be a cause of weakness following a collision during fleet exercises which resulted in the sinking of a battle cruiser." It is my understanding that one advantage the Germans had at Jutland was that their ships were designed without such passageways, while the British ships still had them (to provide for greater habitability on long voyages). Also, how could the design of the Dreadnought benefit from a weakness in a battlecruiser, when no such ships had been built at that time? Vgy7ujm (talk) 23:31, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

The collision in question is that between HMS Camperdown and HMS Victoria sometime in the 1880s, no battlecruisers involved. The British certainly tried in Dreadnought to eliminate underwater passages (or Massie, at least, says they did); not sure if the British reverted to their use or not. Of course, even if there are no passages for personell to travel, there can still be ventilation ducts, steam pipes, electrical conduits and the like which go through the watertight bulkheads - this all muddies the picutre a bit... The Land (talk) 14:07, 28 December 2007 (UTC)
I'm not quite sure whether that means Dreadnought was the first (war?)ship in the Royal Navy or the world to do away with longitudinal passageways. It's not a very well-worded sentence.
Dreadnought was unique for the time, in having "un-pierced bulkheads" which was subsequent practice on all major warships. One innovation resulting from this was the installation of elevators, telephones and stoking indicators in the engineering spaces to facilitate communications between the otherwise difficult-to-reach compartments. Oh, for a copy of John Roberts' Anatomy of the Ship-HMS Dreadnought! --Harlsbottom (talk) 15:14, 28 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Range of guns?

The firing range of typical secondary guns in earlier designs is mentioned in the article, but what was the range of the Dreadnought's own big guns? -- 212.63.43.180 (talk) 15:48, 6 March 2008 (UTC)

NavWeaps.com] gives them conservatively 15,000 yards range. At 13.5 degrees, and with 4crh Greenboy shells their range would have been greater.--Harlsbottom (talk) 17:14, 6 March 2008 (UTC)