On 04Jun2020 2007, Phil Pugliese - philpugliese at yahoo.com (via tml
list) wrote:
> W/i  the last years I've discovered, from old books, the Royal Navy's,
> & the entire world's, initial dreadnought (yep, THE Dreadnought
> herself) was actually quite a design failure with no significant
> secondary & also, under full load, her main armor belt was below the
> waterline, rendering the ship very vulnerable to low-angle fire.
>
> But,  it sure did look COOL, didn't it?
At the time of construction, her secondaries were 'adequate', but
destroyers grew so rapidly in size and torpedoes in range that they very
quickly became insufficent. As for her armour - It made her somewhat
vulnerable to flooding from waterline hits, but "very vulnerable"
overstates the case, as the waterline was still protected by an 8" belt
(and the coal bunkers behind it), and hits there were only going into
the upper decks and not into anything vital. As armour went at the time,
it was pretty good, though the main belt needed to be taller (but that
would've meant too much weight). The fire-control system was vulnerable
to battle damage (fixed during a refit before WWI) and was out of date
very soon after she was commissioned, and her forward mast placement was
poor (so her main observation top was often uninhabitable because of
smoke).

Warship design was advancing and changing very rapidly at the time, and
Dreadnought was both a herald of the new technology and a victim of it.

--
Rupert Boleyn <xxxxxx@gmail.com>