Dilandu wrote:Thrandir wrote:
Really - so your saying a navy that was spread over the entire globe projecting and protecting British interests around the globe did not know what they were suppose to do. What should they have been doing?
Really - they did just that. For example, the great expenses pumped into the great fleet of protected cruisers. Then, the "Dupuy de Lome" and "Rurik" appeared, and RN suddenly understand that their cruiser armada was the greates waste of resources in history.
And the fleet of RN coastal defense rams... Do you really think that any of them was usefull? The ultimate point was the "Victoria"-class large rams and they was the ultimate useless ships.
While I make full allowance for your need to demonstrate that the British navy was in fact a hugely incompetent and stupidly designed force, there are a few problems with your analysis.
I'll give you your criticism of the coastal defense rams,
but the Brits were scarcely alone in building those, although I would question whether the
Victorias really ought to be considered "rams". Whatever the flaws of the coast defense ships, the Brits were simultaneously working on true battleships — like the
Royal Sovereign-class and its successors, which (starting in 1889) showed a clear line of progression right up through the
Lord Nelson-class of 1905. The "rams" were designed to provide what we might think of as "point defense" of harbors and critical coastlines and were never conceived of as part of the British blue water battle fleet.
However, you're still ignoring the matter of how the superior non-British ships you talk about was somehow supposed to defeat the Royal Navy. Specifically, you continue to not place individual ships in the context of the entire fleet — including that fleet’s operational concepts and requirements — in which they served. The British protected cruisers you described as “the greatest waste of resources in history” did
precisely what the British Empire (
and no one else in the world) needed them to do. It’s been a feature of critiques of the Royal Navy’s cruisers forever to deride them as smaller, less capable, more poorly designed, etc., etc. You could even say that it goes all the way back to the British 38-gun frigates of the War of 1812 when they encountered the big American 44s. For that matter, British ships were being criticized as inferior in design to their French counterparts as early as 1750 . . . and kept right on beating the snot out of those superior French ships for the next fifty or sixty years.
The British had more extensive trade routes and overseas colonial possessions to protect than anyone else in the world. They needed numbers of platforms, to give them presence, and they needed those platforms to be individually cheap enough that they could build enough of them. Their protected cruisers were never intended to defeat enemy battle fleets, nor were they intended to take on armored cruisers (once the armored cruisers began to put in an appearance) in one-to-one combats. This really isn’t any different from the fact that between World War I and World War II, the Brits consistently built smaller, more lightly armed cruisers than either the USN or the IJN. They didn’t need the cruising endurance of the Pacific naval powers and they did need to be able to build sufficient numbers within their allocated cruiser tonnage (which was a treaty-mandated equivalent of earlier budgetary considerations). Their function, like that of the protected cruisers you deride) was to be sufficiently widely deployed that only the most powerful of commerce-raiders could hope to prevail against them. The French built
Dupuy de Lomme in 1895 to be precisely that, just as the Russians built the first
Rurik (the one sunk at Ulsan in 1904) in the same year. Prior to that time, the protected cruisers had been fully adequate to deal with anything anyone was likely to send their way, and they remained capable of dealing with anything
lighter well after those armored cruisers had appeared. The British
Orlando-class armored cruisers (the youngest of them six years older than the French or Russian ships) were better armed s, had more reliable machinery, and a greater steaming endurance. They had weaker armor which was more poorly distributed — primarily because their belts were so much narrower and (I think) metallurgically inferior; I really don't have a source in front of me that tells me where they were in the composite armor-to-face hardened armor spectrum) — but their guns were
better distributed (certainly a pair of 9.2” in centerline mounts firing in both broadsides was better than
Dupuy de Lomme’s pair of 7.6” in wing mounts rising from the tumblehome where spray and blast were guaranteed to be major problems in any sort of seaway and only one of them would bear in either broadside, while
Rurik had no centerline guns at all).
The British had absolutely no strategic interest in pushing the parameters on warship design in this period. Yes, they built some “experimental” units, but there was no reason for them to begin building designs which were “more ship” than they needed for the mission in hand and they had every reason to discourage the construction of “super cruisers” by other navies. Once it was evident that those other navies were going to press ahead with efforts to up the ante with progressively more powerful armored cruisers, the Brits had no option but to
respond, which they did by improving on
Orlando with the
Powerful-class, built specifically as answers to
Rurik I and
Rossia. And, if you want an example for why the Brits preferred protected cruisers to armored cruisers, they had twice the tonnage — and cost almost twice as much per ship — as the contemporaneous
Edgar-class protected cruisers which were only 1 knot slower. The
Edgars had almost 50% more cruising endurance and carried the same battery of 2x 9.2” guns, although they had only 10x6” guns compared to
Powerful’s 12x6" and carried 6-pounder QFs rather than
Powerful’s 12-pounders. They were, however, adequate to the vast majority of the Royal Navy’s cruiser requirements for a lot less money, which meant the Brits could have twice as many of them in twice as many places.
In general terms, the British didn’t build armored cruisers
at all until foreign navies pushed the envelope, at which point the Brits relied (as they had before) on the unsurpassed capabilities of their shipbuilding industry to build more of them faster than anyone else. By the time the second
Rurik was completed in 1908, the British counterpart was the
Warrior-class ships. The Russian had 4x10” (centerline; all firing in either broadside), 8x8” (wing turrets; 4 firing in either broadside) and 20x4.7” (10 firing in either broadside) whereas the Brits had 6x9.2” (centerline and wing turrets; 4 firing in either broadside) and 4x7.5”(2 firing in either broadside) and 26 3-pdrs. The 4.7” shell was about fourteen times as heavy as the 3-pounder, so even though the 3-pounder’s rate of fire was three times that of the 4.7”, the Russian light gun was clearly superior. There’s no doubt that
Rurik II was the superior ship in a one-to-one confrontation, however, the Tsar had
one of them, whereas there were
three Warriors. Again, the Brits had deliberately chosen to build marginally less powerful ships in order to build them in the numbers they required. The follow-on
Minotaurs was more heavily gunned but more lightly armored, with 4x9.2” in twin centerline mounts and 10x 7.5” (ballistically superior to the Russian 8”) in 5 single mounts in each broadside, backed up by 16-12-pounders (still inferior to the Russian 4.7”, although the 12-pounder threw almost half the same weight of metal per minute, given the differences in rate of fire). And, of course, the successor in British service to
Minotaur was something called a “battlecruiser,” which pretty much made all existing armored cruisers obsolete overnight.
My point is simply this. You can, at any point in the evolution of warships, probably find a ship, or a small class of ships, which is superior in combat power to ships in British service. What you will
not find is a fleet — a
fleet — which believed that it had a realistic chance of beating the Royal Navy at sea because they weren’t facing
individual ships; they were facing the entire Royal Navy with
their entire navy. Frankly, the French were in the position of building superior — or what they hoped would be superior — ships in an effort to leapfrog the queue and provide themselves with a technologically
qualitative superiority because they knew they were incapable of matching the British numerical, institutional, and infrastructure superiority. The only European navy that ever mounted a systematic, serious threat to British seapower was that of Germany, with the High Seas Fleet prior to 1914 and its U-boats post-1916 and in World War II. When Britain finally surrendered her position as
the dominant seapower of the world, it was to an ally, as well as a competitor: the USN.
and, Mangy Fur the Smart Alick Spacecat.