Battleships

Battleship was the name given to the most powerfully gun-armed and most heavily armored classes of warships built from the mid-16th through the mid-20th centuries. more...

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Battleships evolved from northern European cogs, and included carracks and galleons in the 16th Century, ships of the line in the 17th and 18th centuries, broadside ironclads and Pre-Dreadnoughts in the 19th century, and Dreadnoughts in the 20th Century. For over 300 years battleships ruled the waves, allowing nations such as Portugal, the Netherlands, Spain, France and Great Britain to create and maintain trade-based overseas empires and restrain their rivals. During World War II (1939-45) they were superseded as the deciding factor at sea by aircraft carriers.

The word "battleship" originated with the development of the line-of-battle tactic, in which ships usually followed each other single-file and engaged the enemy ships to one side, in the mid 17th century. Ships expected to form part of this line were called ships-of-the-line-of-battle or line-of-battle ships, eventually reducing to battleship. They were divided into several classes - first-, second- and third-rates. Fourth- and fifth-rates were frigates, and sixth-rates were sloops (strictly "sloops-of-war"). These vessels were used for communications and reconnaissance and did not usually fight in fleet encounters. Although this classification worked well in the 18th century, from the middle of the 19th century, the terminology became confused by the introduction of large steam-powered armoured single-deck ships with a small number of very powerful guns. These were technically frigates because they had a single gundeck, but they were designed to fight as ships of the line, and were the most potent warships of their time.

Early Battleships

The origin of the concept of the battleship can be found in the cogs used by northern European navies in the 12th-15th Centuries. These vessels had an advantage over galleys or viking longships because they had raised platforms called "castles" at bow and stern which could be occupied by archers, who fired down on enemy ships. Over time these castles became higher and larger, and eventually started to be built into the structure of the ship, increasing overall strength.

It was ships such as these that were first used in experiments with carrying large-caliber guns aboard. Galleys were equipped with guns, mainly of small caliber, but these ships could carry heavier guns. By placing them higher and firing them through holes cut in the sides of the ships, a much more powerful warship type was developed. These were known as "round ships" or "great ships", and had several advantages over lower vessels. They were more weatherly, could fire their guns from higher up and could therefore do more destruction amongst crews in galleys, were harder to board and more resistant to gunfire. The lack of need for rowing crews saved much space, but left them at the mercy of fickle winds, meaning that galleys were still often used to tow these ships into position for a battle and during battles. Galleys could still overwhelm great ships, especially when there was little wind and they had a numerical advantage, but as great ships increased in size, galleys became less and less useful. As great ships, later known as carracks, and then galleons, spread through Europe, reaching the Mediterranean Sea in around 1600, and helping to explore the world and maintain trade routes across stormy oceans, galleys and galleasses (a larger, higher type of galley with side-mounted guns, but lower than a galleon) were used less and less, and by about 1750 had little impact upon naval battles. By the 1710s every major naval power was building ships like these.

Read more at Wikipedia.org