"The worst battleship?" Topic

I'm tempted to vote for the 1906 HMS Dreadnought, because of all the ships that became obsolete the moment her design specs were known.

But I'll vote for the Massena instead. Four different kinds of gun (many of them too close to the water), barely seaworthy, and the ugliest slab of iron ever to make a mockery of the buoyancy principle.

What's your least favorite?

Not really a follower of Navy things…but wow the Massena is one ugly ship.

I'm tempted to vote for the 1906 HMS Dreadnought, because of all the ships that became obsolete the moment her design specs were known.

I am not following you here. Would that not make the Dreadnught one of the best battleships ever?

The Swedish Vasa – sunk in the harbor on its maiden voyage

HMS Hood

Cke1st: I have to agree with you. Massena is one ugly ship!!

Those round Russian ones!

The one currently in theaters.

Dont know about worst, but Massena would take a prize for the ugliest. Hood was battle cruiser different beast altogether.

USS Maine did have that unfortunate incident where she exploded and sunk for no readily apparent reason…

Yamato and Musashi, an enormous waste of resources with very little to show for it.

"Those round Russian ones"

I think you mean the "Popovka's"

Just plain silly ships…

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There are a whole range of weird and wonderful ships built between 1860 and about 1885, when they really didn't know what a battleship should be. Personally I like the British ones with the muzzle loading rifled guns.

The French ship Hoche:

Not exactly going to win any beauty contests.
And here she is under way, kind of:

The French had quite a knack for building some pretty goofy looking ships in the ironclad/pre-dreadnought era. Don´t get me started on their cruisers!

Obviously the french had a knack for making a ship look like it had been designed by a committee. BUT, the Russian ships Admiral Popov and Novgorod have to be the worst. Each engine had its own throttle and they were impossible to steer in a straight line.

I agree on that. So look-wise, the, er, award goes to the French, but utility-wise is a clear Russian victory. my favorite thing about the Popovkas is how they spun around when they fired their guns. They could have sold tickets for that ride. Of course, everyone would be seasick.

The french had a knack for ugly ships.
Some, 'looked like a factory on fire', would have been a charitable description.

Some ships were so despised, that even their own sailors cheered when one of their battleships hit a mine off the Dardanelles.

What takes the cake is the Russians buying a contract for french designs by ordering the Borodinos.

Any French BB from 1890-1920

Big picture, ultimately IJN Shinano due to a sequence of increasingly bad decisions and desperation.

You guys piqued my curiosity, so I Googled "Massena battleship". It's no wonder nobody posted pictures, since she is so ugly that the pictures would be NSFW.

Don't insult the Popovskis! I had a fun game with them in onf The Monstrous Jake's games!
Even if they wee designed by Acme for Wile E Coyote,,,

It's so difficult making best/worst comparisons when there is no time frame specified. To be fair, you would have to outline an era since ship design would likely entail a combination of what went before, technological/tactical advances and the perceived enemy threat i.e. "it seemed to be a good idea at the time…". That being said – and although I love French ship design, the crappiest has to be Hoche. What were they thinking??? The model of Hoche in the Musee De La Marine in Paris is so beautiful in its grotesqueness that I took plenty of photos planning for the day that I would eventually build a model of her…

I'd go with the Austro-Hungarian Radetzky class, predreadnought ships that were designed after the Dreadnought had been launched. I realize that the Imperial Navy was under both physical and financial constraints at the time, but why build not one, not two, but three ships to a design that was known to be obsolete before the blueprints were drafted?

Just as an aside, these ships were so cramped belowdecks that the crew had to come on deck to get dressed.

LT

Besides which, Austria is a land-locked country, so what use was it for them to build battleships? Steam down the Danube to bombard Belgrade? The things governments do for prestiege!

Austria wasn't land-locked at the time….
-Kle.

Wow--the French ships are just hideous--Massena is so bad that one wonders how it passed by the review committees…however, I wonder about the sea handling of the Hoch--from the picture above, I question it's seaworthiness in any kind of rough weather…

As to the question, I think you have to refine it to a specific period. Some ships that were excellent in WWI were death traps by WWII (R Class battleships, older US dreadnaughts, some of the older Japanese ones).

Overall, though, hard to beat the Vasa, as Korvessa noted above. On the other hand, it's the centerpiece of the best maritime museum I've ever been to.
regards,
HD

Captain wasn't all that awesome.

Some of the later British muzzle-loading ships that hat to train their guns to one position to reload were kind of spurious.

The 2 Kearsarges weren't great, with their secondary battery that couldn't train independently of their main guns.

Most of the various ships with their main batteries en echelon were fairly ill-conceived.
-Kle.

however, I wonder about the sea handling of the Hoch--from the picture above, I question it's seaworthiness in any kind of rough weather…

Many, if not most, of the low-freeboard battleships of the era were very poor sea boats. France mostly intended their home fleet BBs for the Med and for coastal operations. I don't recall any of them sinking due to weather, like Captain.
-Kle.

Oddly, I *like* the French pre-dreads. Warships shouldn't really be designed to be 'pretty', though!

I'd have to agree with the Radetzky-class. Who the heck makes a design that's already obsolete before you put ink to paper?

"I'd have to agree with the Radetzky-class. Who the heck makes a design that's already obsolete before you put ink to paper?"

The Royal and Imperial Austro-Hungarian Empire perfected beauracracy far in advance of anyhting the European Union could even dream of. Their forces suffered the more for it.

Texas Jack, that is indeed an odd looking ship, though I wouldn't call it ugly, I'd call it fascinating!

Yes, fascinating in much the same way as the scene of a car accident :)

Did ships of the same vintage as the Hoche actually see any action, or were their careers spent as deterrents? I don't know anything post ACW.

Some of the smaller French vessels saw action against the Chinese, most notably at Foo Chow in 1884, but fortunately our friend Hoche spent almost all her career within site of the French coast, much to the chagrin of all who had villas on the beach, I´m sure.

Since nobody will post a picture of Messena, I will.

That said Hoche is pretty bad. Then there is the French Henri IV

Messena – the Zardoz of naval architecture.

Hey, you oogly AND useless?

Get out your Jane's (etc) and check out the German built Chen Yuen and Ting Yuen for the Imperial Chinese Navy.

My personal favorites for "State Funded Future Fish Habitats."

TVAG

I always liked her :)

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As for the Henri IV, she looks like someone had a design for the bow, and someone else for the stern, and they just kind of glued her together. And yes, Messena is no work of art.

The tumblehome design looks odd to us today, but it was a perfectly viable design method. Some of them are little busy looking, but they weren't particularly ineffective.

The Maine has been mentioned. She is not the only battleship to blow herself up, but she is the only one that helped to start a war because of it.

The German WW2 pocket battleships are not generally well considered ships. They now seem to get demoted to heavy crusers but their speed was subpar, and it is my understanding that their 11-inch guns were not particularly effective.

They did have a very long range, and thus would classify as the worlds most overbuilt surface raiders – except that the Bismark and Tirpitz arguably also would take that title away from them.

There's a running gag among my friends about the Japanese battleship Fuso, or, as we put it, Fuuuussooooo!

Pagoda masts are truly the devil's handiwork.

HMS Glatton – too low a freeboard for a seagoing turret ship, too deep a draught for coastal defence and too slow to ram anything. Also the only RN ship I know off named after a village in inland Huntingdonshire – just up the road from my aunt's.

The WORST battleship?

Spain's Jaime Primero or Espana. Take the weakness of the Invincible battle-cruisers, cut out a few hundred feet of the hull, and make them slow and as ugly as the French ships. At LEAST the French ships carried heavy protection.

The French pre-dreadnoughts WERE ugly, but the Jaime Primero-- worst of all.

There's a real elegance about the Italian designs, and even the wierd stacks on the Soviet Marats give it a bizarre though not unappealing look, but the French-- ugh! Though they did redeem themselves with the Dunquerke and Jean Bart Classes.

Took em long enough!

Captain wasn't sunk by the weather, but by being built without stability!
The Hapsburg vessels mentioned above were actually quite good for what they were designed as, Coast Defence ships, designed to take on Italian cruisers and very close to home, hence the cramped accomodation.
The French "Redoubtable" class are pretty poor as well.
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The Russian Peresvet class were similarly poor.
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the wierd stacks on the Soviet Marats give it a bizarre though not unappealing look

They are described in Jane's as "cramped and extremely unsanitary below decks," and the secondary guns were in just the right place to suffer from the blast of the main guns. They weren't the worst, but I'd put them somewhere in my list of the bottom-10 battleships.

How about HMS Furious, in her original incarnation? One humongous 18" gun on a hull built to light-cruiser standards. Contemporary reports say the shock of firing sheared off rivet heads from the bow to the stern. Doubtless her armament would have shaken her to pieces if they hadn't made a carrier out of her.

Or HMS Victoria? She's in the running for the ugly prize, her guns drooped in their mountings and warped the decks when fired ahead, her fo'c'sle was awash even at moderate speeds, and her most notable achievements were (1) running aground and (2) sinking after being rammed.

Another notable achievement by HMS Victoria is the fact that she is a vertical shipwreck – i.e. dove straight into the bottom and is sticking up like a fencepost. Reading an account of her sinking is fascinating in that you can see it coming from a long ways but there is nothing that is done until the final, inexorable end…

Everybody's hating on the French pre-dreds :(

You can't hate this can you??

Can you??

I actually like them

The French ships look like the hull's been glued on upside down!

When the rest of the ship wasn't built around the idea of going through the waves, yes, I can and will hate on a wave-piercing bow.