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HMS DREADNOUGHT

HMS Dreadnought was so advanced that her name became a generic term for modern battleships, whilst the ships she made obsolete became known as "pre-dreadnoughts."  From 1906, the world’s battle fleets officially were divided into Dreadnoughts and pre-Dreadnoughts.

HMS Dreadnought was the first battleship of her era to have a uniform main battery, rather than having a few large guns complemented by a heavy secondary battery of somewhat smaller guns.

In the late 1800s battleship designs generally featured large guns mounted in turrets or barbettes located fore and aft, with the sides of the ship mounting many smaller caliber guns whose high rate of fire could shower the enemy with small but damaging shells. There was no effective fire control system however, and the effective range of all of the guns was rarely greater than 2,000 meters.

Long range gunnery testing led officials to develop a fire control system where the splashes of the shells around the target were observed, with minor gunnery changes ordered accordingly. Testing revealed that using that method increased the practical range of the guns to 7,000 meters. It did create a new problem however – how to differentiate between the splashes of the large and small guns? Gunnery observers onboard the ship wouldn’t know which splash belonged to which gun, and thus not know which guns to adjust.

In 1903 the chief designer of the Italian Navy, Vittorio Cuniberti, proposed to solve the problem by arming battleships with a single caliber of large gun. While his ideas fell on deaf ears within the Italian Navy, officials in the Royal Navy, particularly Jackie Fisher, had been considering the same idea. In 1904 Fisher became the First Sea Lord, then the most powerful position in the Royal Navy, and immediately began pushing for a new class of battleship armed with an “all-big-gun” armament. He claimed he could design a ship armed solely with 12” guns and capable of a speed of 21 knots - and deliver it in less than a year.

In parallel with the armament development, Fisher pushed for steam turbine propulsion, a then-young technology that showed great promise but had yet to sway the Royal Navy brass. The system had many advantages including reduced cost and weight, higher reliability, and better fuel efficiency. They operated best at high speeds however. In fact, to operate properly at low speeds, four propellers were required, negating some of the cost and weight savings. For his new battleship design however Fisher demanded that they be installed.

Construction of the new ship began in October 1905. The HMS Dreadnought was launched just four months later, though fitting out took another ten months. Her fourteen month construction time remains a record for a ship of that size and was roughly half as long as it took to normally build a battleship.

When commissioned the HMS Dreadnought was the largest battleship in the world, displacing 21,845 tons fully loaded. She was armed with ten 12 inch guns in five turrets, three on the centerline and one on each side. This configuration gave her twice the firepower of any other ship then in service. She could also control those guns with a new centralized fire control system that allowed all the guns to be fired at the same target, unlike previous designs that featured local control of each gun turret. HMS Dreadnought rendered all other ships obsolete. Jackie Fisher stated that compared to the Dreadnought, all other ships could neither fight nor run away.

On 18 March 1915, HMS Dreadnought became the only battleship to sink a submarine during the First World War. The Grand Fleet was at sea conducting tactical exercises, when U-29 fired a torpedo at the fleet. Dreadnought sighted the submarine, and a chase began. After ten minutes the Dreadnought rammed the submarine, which sank with the loss of all hands.

The end of the “War to End All Wars” brought with it heavily reduced defense budgets around the globe. The Royal Navy’s aggressive ship building program was scaled back, and the HMS Dreadnought herself became a victim of the cutbacks. Broken up and sold for scrap in 1921, it was an ignominious end for one of history’s most revolutionary ships.

This primarily wood HMS Dreadnought model is 32" long x 14" tall x 7" wide (1/200 scale) $3,290  Shipping and insurance in the contiguous USA included. Other places: $350 flat rate. Model is built per commission only. We require only a small deposit to start the process. Please click here for more details.

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Learn more about the HMS Dreadnought here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(1906)