Real Marina Britanica

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Pongo este tema por aca:

Diseño de Acorazados Britanicos en cuestion:

El HMS Hood no ha sido el uniko buque Britanico en reventar con una salva de oportunidad, matando en el evento a el 99% de su tripulacion. HMS Invincible corrio la misma suerte.

Battle Cruiser Invincible
Built by Armstrong Whitworth, ELswick, she was completed in March 1908, but along with her sister ships was inadequately protected. At the Battle of the Falklands - Malvinas para los amigos Argentinos - in late 1914. Invincible hunted down and anhilitated the German armoured cruisers Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. Invincible gave a good account of herself at the Battle of Jutland in MAy 1916, but the German battleship Derflinger manage to blow the top off one of her turrets which ignited an ammunition magazine below. The Invincible was blown apart and all but six of her 1,026 marines were killed

There were also fast capital ships called battle-cruisers, which were as big as battleships, carrying the same powerful long-reaching guns, but their thinner armour was their downfall. At the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the Royal Navy lost three of them, causing Admiral Beatty, the RN's Battle Cruiser Fleet commander to observe: "There is something wrong with our bloody ships today." At Trafalgar in 1805, the Royal Navy suffered 1,692 killed and wounded, while at Jutland it lost 6,097 killed, most of them in the battle-cruisers. Broadsides were exchanged at greater distances but the destructive power of a dreadnought was far more devastating than Nelson's HMS Victory could ever muster.

HMS Victoria
A strange looking vessel altogether, the Battleship Victoria carried two massive 16.5-inch guns but had a very low freeboard. Such a design (and with a displacement of 10,000 tons) spelled trouble. In June 1893, while leading the Mediterranean fleet in a complex set of manoeuvres off the Syrian coast, the Victoria was in collision with HMS Camperdown and sank with heavy loss of life. Among the survivors was Commander John Jellicoe, who would lead the Grand Fleet during WW1. The commander-in-chief of the mediterranean fleet, Vice-Admiral sir George Tryon was among those drowned.

Fuente: Revista Warships. International Fleet Review

Continuara.....

[pedro_rafael]

HMS King Edward VII
This vessel was the last of a long line of late pre-dreadnought battleship designs and was completed in 1905. During WW1 she was Flagship 3rd Battle Squadron Grand Fleet. She struck a mine on January 6, 1916 off Cape Wrath; both engine rooms flooded and she eventually capsized and sank. Remarkably there was time to get all of her 777 sailors and marines off and an attempt was even made to tow her bach to Scapa Flow.

HMS Dreadnought
Dreadnought massive armament consisted of five twin 12-inch turrets, three on the centre line and two amidships on either beam, giving her a broadside of eight guns from four turrets. During WW1 she served as Flagship for the 4th and 3rd Battle Squadrons. She became the only battleship to ever sink a submarine, when on March 18, 1915 she rammed U-29.

Dreadnought missed the Battle of Jutland, due to being in refit at Rosyth, but she did provide accomodation for officers and men of the badly battered Warspite, which put into a nearby dry-dock for repairs. At the end of the war she was paid off and broken up in 1923.

What made Dreadnought revolutionary was a single calibre main armament mounted in turrets, which permitted controlled salvoes, plus he had high-speed turbine machinery (a type of propulsion only used in destroyers until then). Four sets of turbines turned four shafts, giving her a top high-speed of 22 knots. Dreadnought's displacement of 20,700 tons was greater than any previous warship and she instantly provided an alternative label for the new breed of battleships, which were soon referred to uniformly as 'dreadnoughts'. The dreadnoughts were the ICBMs of their day, with a country's standing rated according to the number it possessed.

Britain was the Premiere League Leader, with Germany snapping at her heels. Other dreadnoughts competitions raged between France, Turkey and Italy in the Mediterranean and between Russia and Japan in the Far East. Meanwhile, the Americans stood back from it all and quietly built the Foundations of a powerful navy that was, by the middle of the 20th Century, to eclipse all others.

HMS Royal Oak
Built as one of five Revenge Class battleships, she was launched in November 1914 at Plymouth and served during WW1. The class was refitted, though not modernised during the inter-war years. U-47 penetrated the defences of Scapa Flow and sank Royal Oak on the night of October 13/14 1939. The battleship took less than a quarter of an hour to sink, taking 786 of her complement with her.

HMS Courageous
Built as one of three light battle-cruiser - Furious & Glorious were the others - and completed in July 1917, she was intended for service in the Baltic, the idea being that the shallow draught and heavy armament would make her (and her sisters) formidable in support of an amphibious attack on Germany. However, the scheme never came to anything, the British government preferring to rely on the stalemate of the Western Front and the RN's distant blockade to destroy the Kaiser's military machine.

Courageous was converted to an aircraft-carrier in the late 1920's, and gave good service during the inter-war period. She was sunk off-Ireland, while serving with the Home Fleet, by U-29 during the opening stages of WW2, on September 17, 1939. Courageous had been sent out as part of a roving submarine-hunting group, an idea that was soon abandoned. More than 500 members of the carrier's complement paid the price for this failed experiment.

Saludos,

[pedro_rafael]

Interesante Inserto historico:

The victory of Trafalgar had secured British naval dominance of the seven seas and the Royal Navy was theretofore the guarantor of the Pax Britannica that prevailed. The British Empire expanded at a rapid rate and the shipping lanes were packed with vessels carrying trade to and from the mother country. Until the launch of HMS Warrior in 1860, the vessels of the RN were little more than variations of the traditional man-o-war which had first been conceived in the 16th Century. What made HMS Warrior radical was that she was a response to equally strindent advances in gunnery and propulsion. The 9,000 tons vessel was constructed with four-and-a-half inch iron armour clad over 18 inches of teak, to protect herself against fire from new, rifled guns.

HMS Warrior had steam propulsion as well as sails, but her guns were still largely mounted in broadside fashion, and the warships of the RN continued with this battery approach until the 1870s.

The advantages of putting guns in rotating turrets had been demonstrated in anger during the American Civil War of the 1860s, although a British officer had shown the benefits of mounting them on revolving platforms during the Crimean War of the 1850's.

The first British battleship to do way entirely with sail power was HMS Devastation, launched in 1871. The use of turreted guns, which needed free arcs of fire unblocked by masts and rigging, and improvements in the reliability of steam engines brought about this development.

But the shapes which would today be recognised as battleships were not to emerge until the early years of the following century, after an ugly interim period which saw a hotch-potch of ship designs. Many earlier line-of-battle ships were up-dated with the addition of iron plating on hulls for protection and lengthening of hulls for steam propulsion. New metallurgical techniques were soon to allow the design of new hull shapes, but it was not this advance, which really spurred the Admiralty to radical thinking.

Superpower rivalry was to be the main inspiration for revolutionary battleship designs. In parallel with the battleship design, that of frigates and sloops also evolved rapidly, for the cruisers and patrol vessels pf Victoria's navy were most valuable (and numerous), enforcing the peace in Britain's favour around the world on exotic (and sometimes forgotten) stations.

Fuente: revista Warships. International Fleet Review.

[pedro_rafael]

Otro Inserto Historico:

Immediately post WW1 the brakes were put on new battleship building by the 1922 Washington Treaty, which sought to limit numbers, tonnage and armament of capital ships. While the Washington Treaty barred construction of any new battleships for 10 years, it has loopholes that enabled development of the vessels of war which were to be the keys to victory in WW2 - submarines and aircraft carriers. Japan in particular saw that aircraft carriers would be worth heavy investment in parallel with an ambitious, and secret, battleship building programme. All the major naval powers kept their cruiser force strong, in order topolice shipping lanes and, particularly in Britain's case, far flung colonies.

Once the 10-year blanket ban on battleship construction was over attempts were made to limit new designs, but the Germans, Japanese and Italians cheated. They claimed their new battleships were within the limits when it was obvious to the trained eye that they could not possibly be so.

The 1935 London Naval Conference was convened as a last ditch attempt to stave off the new naval arms race. An agreement was reached, limiting tonnage of new battleships to 40,000 tons, but the Japanese did not sign it as they had withdrawn from the conference. In 1937m with Japanese, Italian and German militarism taking little heed of any such agreements, battleship restrictions were abandoned by Britain, France and America.

Few of the new dreadnoughts were to be finished by the time war broke out in September 1939, but during hostilities 23 battleships were completed. The Royal Navy had decided - despite Germany nearly defeating Britain through unrestricted submarine warfare in WW1 - that the main threat still lay in surface raiders (roaming groups of capital ships).

Those funds that were available in the late 1930s for shipbuilding were therefore concentrated in modernising and building new cruisers and battleships, with the principal aim of dominating the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean and securing them from the depredation of surface raiders.
Limited modernisation programmes for battleship and battlecruisers built during WW1, or just after, were proposed but in most cases had not been carried out by the beginning of hostilities. Britain did launch dozens and dozens of destroyers, frigates and sloops that would play a key role in winning the Battle of the Atlantic and a new generation of battleships helped destroy Hitler's capital ships. But, as the war neared its end, the focus in many construction yards was on aircraft carriers, the new capital ships that had quite obviously replaced the battleship as an indicator of a nation's potency. With the end of the war the Royal Navy was rapidly denuded of the ships that had helped achieve victory while the majority of its men went back to Civvy street.

[pedro_rafael]

Informacion acerca de la Transicion de la propulsion a vela hacia los Acorazados:




http://www.btinternet.com/~philipr/TBNPandP.html

Saludos,