HMS Eagle (1918) United Kingdom – Aircraft Carrier HMS Eagle was the fourth British aircraft carrier to enter service, after the Furious, Argus and Hermes, and a compromise. Taking a massive dreadnought to carry 25 planes would seems ludicrous to us today, but there were little options at the time, but scrapping the ship entirely, … Read more
World’s navies (1863 to today) As these lines are written, the world would remember medical personal and nurses involved in the present COVID19 pandemic. But ships dedicated to the care of the wounded existed almost since the red cross was invented: By Swiss businessman Henri Dunant, horrified to see casualties at the battle of Solférino … Read more
Moltke class Battlecruisers Germany (1910) Battlecruisers – SMS Moltke, SMS Goeben Development and Design A May 1907 conference already defined the path that would lead to the decision of building two ‘all big guns capital ships’ when the German Naval Office decided make a follow-up of the Von der Tann, with an enlarged design and … Read more
Germany (1907-1917) Von der Tann, Molkte, Goeben, Seydlitz, Derrflinger, Lützow, Hindenburg Foreword: German battlecruisers: The German Empire was the second country after the British Empire to massively invest in battlecruisers. Neither the US, caught late by the war, France, which naval plan of 1912 was halted, Italy, which preferred to focus on dreadnoughts missed the … Read more
Chinese PLAN (1997-2004) Lianyungang, Jiaxing, Putian, Yichang, Huludao, Sanming, Xiangyang, Huaihua, Luoyang, Mianyang In the 1980s, the PLA Navy ordered Hudong Shipyard in Shanghai, later Hudong-Zhonghua, to design a replacement for the Type 053K AA frigate. The new vessel would be based on the previous Type 053H2 frigate, and natural designation followed as H2G. Development … Read more
Marinha do Brasil: Riachuelo, Aquidabã The first Brazilian modern Battleship: The ironclad Riachuelo was one of the main reasons which pushed the Congress, at the insistence of the USN admiralty, to built battleships, notably the USS Texas. At that time indeed, a naval rivalry between south American countries pushed Brazil, Argentina and Chile to order … Read more
USA (1896-99) USS Kearsarge, Kentucky The tandem turreted battleships: The Kearsarge class was certainly not the best remembered of the USN’s battleships as they played a minor part in WW1 and were scrapped afterward, but from a design standpoint, they were out an interesting out-of-the-box solution to an old problem: That of cramming firepower in … Read more
Komar class FACs (1960) Proyekt 183R – 112 boats 1952-60 The world’s first Fast Attack Crafts: USSR in the early cold war was resolutely embracing innovation to compensate for its numerical inferiority: The Komar class FACs, using antiship missiles, was one such solutions. The Soviet Navy in its post-Stalin era resolutely was not strong strong … Read more
Italy (1896-22) 52 ships From Torpedo boats to destroyers Audace in 1918 Development of Italian torpedo boats had a lot to do with its immediate Adriatic neighbour and rival, Austria-Hungary. Indeed it’s a subject of the Empire which in the late 1860s and early 1870s developed for the first time a new kind of naval … Read more
Barbarossa class battleships (1892) Barbaros Hayreddin, Turgut Reis (1910) The Barbarossa class battleships were the first modern pre-dreadnoughts, capital ships of the Ottoman Navy, named respectively Hayrediin Barbarossa and Turgut Reis. These were the ex-Weissenburg and Kurfürst Friedrich Wilhelm, which after years of service were no longer relevant and considered obsolete in 1910. The Turkish … Read more
