"Protected Cruisers in the Pre-Dreadnought Era " Topic

"The British Empire was vast and overextended in the late 1800s, and dependent upon vulnerable sea lanes. To compensate it had a Navy equal to the next two contenders combined. British bankers and businessmen built a network of intercontinental telegraph lines, reaching all of the way to New Zealand by 1876, with London at the center. The role of protected cruisers was for protecting commerce, and raiding that of the enemy, often operating distantly and independently around the globe.

"Britainia's Spartan" by Antoine Vanner is the story of the shakedown cruise of the fictional HMS Leonidas, first of her class. Captain Nicholas Dawlish has earned the honor of being her first commander. We have followed his meteoric career in earlier books, and like all career people, he must struggle to find a balance, and determine if that balance is worth the personal cost. In a similar way a warship must find a balance between speed, firepower, and protection, and do so at an acceptable cost in lives and resources. This is an outline of naval dynamics with respect to protected cruisers in the dawn of the Pre-Dreadnought Era, when hydraulics, electricity, and triple reciprocating steam engines were enhancing the capabilities of warships, but before submarines, destroyers, and airplanes, much less carriers and tenders for them, changed the nature of naval warfare…"
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