HMS Dreadnought: Jackie Fisher's 125-Day Hull and the Rammed U-29

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HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, made every other battleship obsolete. Pre-dreadnoughts carried mixed batteries, but as torpedoes pushed engagements out to 6,000 yards, gunners could not tell the splashes of heavy shells from those of the smaller guns. British observers including Captain William Pakenham saw in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 that 12-inch guns did the decisive damage at ranges up to 14,000 yards, while Admiral Togo's faster fleet crossed the T. Italy's Vittorio Cuniberti had described an all-big-gun ship in 1903 and Japan started the Satsuma five months earlier, but Britain built first. First Sea Lord Jackie Fisher demanded only 12-inch guns and at least 21 knots, stacked a Committee on Designs with his own advisers, and had Portsmouth Dockyard finish the 18,000-ton hull in 125 days, with 3,000 men working 69-hour, six-day weeks.

Dreadnought was the first battleship driven by steam turbines, reaching 21.6 knots with 23,000 shaft horsepower, and carried ten 45-caliber 12-inch guns firing 850-pound shells more than nine miles, aimed with a Dumaresq mechanical calculator and Vickers range clocks. The rush left flaws: fully loaded, the 11-inch armor belt sat more than a foot below the waterline, officers were moved forward beside noisy machinery, and the spotting top sat behind the front funnel, engulfed in exhaust, a problem never fixed. In March 1915 in the Pentland Firth she rammed and cut the German submarine U-29 in half, the only time a battleship has deliberately rammed and sunk a submarine. She missed Jutland in 1916 while in refit, went to reserve in 1918, and in 1921 was sold for scrap for 36,630 pounds after costing nearly 1.8 million.

• Engineer Charles Parsons sold the Navy on turbines by crashing Queen Victoria's 1897 Diamond Jubilee review in his yacht Turbinia at 34 knots.
• The ship carried almost 3,000 tons of coal and over 1,000 tons of fuel oil, spraying oil onto the coal to speed the burn.
• King Edward VII christened her with a bottle of Australian wine in February 1906.
• In the 1910 Dreadnought hoax, Horace de Vere Cole and friends including Virginia Woolf posed as Abyssinian royalty and got a full tour.
• The name later went to a guitar shape, Britain's first nuclear submarine and the dinosaur Dreadnoughtus.