Shipbucket

So this is going to be a broad question. Why? What went through designers minds when gun arrangements like these were used? Can anyone shed some light on this?

What's so bizarre about them?

Last is not bizarre at all, while first two can be said that. 1870-1890's was intermediate era for the battleship, everything possible gun arrangement was tested. First ironclads had appeared only ten years before and until 1850's ships had broadside cannons like in 17th-18th century.

IMO
A) early on you want to replace your centre battery with turrets why not put them in the centre ? they are very heavy (compared to ship size) and therefore have to be placed low down and you need to stop them getting flooded by every wave so put them in driest part of ship best able to take the weight (the centre with widest part of ship)

B) Designed for end on fire, if you haven't worked out tactics yet (nobody has had a big battle since early 1800s) and you are worried about somebody crossing your T.

C) German early dreadnought with hex arrangement, due to lack of centre line length to fit turrets on small ship (if you haven't developed super firing and you have long VTE engines)

Hi all,

While the first one looks weird, and must have crowded the boilers and engines somewhat (unless they got displaced fore-and-aft) it's a reasonable solution to getting good arcs for your main armament - those two turrets can both shoot over the bow and the stern, if I'm reading that layout correctly, and they've got 180 degree arcs on each side. Comes with a lot of costs, mind (beam must be fairly nasty), but purely in terms of layout seems weird but kinda OK.

Third one is a Nassau-class, I think, contemporary with HMS Dreadnought - as JSB has stated, lack of super-firing turrets caused problems mounting the guns - Dreadnought herself almost had this arrangement, all you'd have to do is change the 'X' turret for a couple of wing turrets and you're back to the HSF hex arrangement.

Regards,
Adam

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I ended up reading about the first picture. Basically the idea was that the two turrets could either fire forward at the same time or rearward, but the superstructure ended up getting damaged each time they tried to do that. So it winded up only being able to fire to the sides.

Experimentation is pretty interesting.

Found a really great video that shows how one of these strange gun arrangements operates. Loading seems super interesting and requires the gun to rotate back to its original position to reload.

https://youtu.be/B13EX_82CBE

Normal for that time, when the Navy's needed bigger gun than the crew can handle. The solution the used are quit nice. and are very similar (basically) as you would find on more modern Dreadnoughts and battleships, the difference is that battleships and dreadnought have it all inside the turret in an more compact version of it.

The first; One of a series of ships in the ~1880's, before modern steel armor. The thicknesses required to stop the steadily growing power of rifled guns got into the six hundred millimetre range - you simply could not armor much of the ship to this level. By concentrating the turrets amidships, and putting the boilers opposite, you protected the magazines and turret bases, while leaving the ends unarmored, or 'soft' - as long as the central citadel remained unflooded, the ship would remain afloat. The cut-aways are to provide some measure of end-on fire while also putting the turrets so close together. They are so low as this was the era of the Coles/Ericsson 'full' turret - this is a heavy, heavy monster, that the 'turret on barbette' we know by the 'turret' designation replaced. They weighed so much, they could not be mounted high up without adversely affecting stability - there were also concerns about dead zones and arcs of fire - HMS Monarch was much criticized at the time for having such poor arcs of fire with how high her turrets were mounted above the water.

The second; A german coast-defense ship, if I remember correctly. You may be able to see that these are not true turrets - only shields over guns in barbettes. Somewhat lightly armored, a single shell could knock out both guns if they were mounted together, and end-on fire was deemed important for use while closing to ram - why not make two separate guns firing forwards on opposite beams? Single turrets fired faster, and still do - for manually loaded and served guns, the more in the turret, the more they interfere with each other and slow the rate of fire over an 'ideal'.

The third; Germany didn't have much idea what they were doing at the time - nobody did - they required lots of room to fit reciprocating engine arrangements amidships, and the Imperial Navy at the time liked the idea of a 'reserve' of guns, so that if one side's were knocked out, you had two fresh turrets to engage. Added to a dislike of/no experience with superfiring arrangements and still keeping the wish for end-on fire, it's impressive the British managed to go through with saving weight by replacing the second pair with a single turret.