In February 1905 DNC and E-in-C wrote that the Committee really wanted triple screws. However, space and weight and the need for subdivision all demanded four or more shafts. Turbines normally consisted of a high- and a low-pressure cylinder. For compactness, the two could drive two shafts and that in turn militated for an even number of shafts. Hence the four-shaft arrangement, with the shafts paired.
A Legend dated 8 March 1905 was labelled Dreadnought rather than ‘New Battleship Design H’. It showed the same 12in armour at the waterline as a Lord Nelson, but thicker side armour above it (8in and 9in rather than 4in). However, the 14 February 1905 version showed 11in–4in side armour (17,750 tons) and the reduction in maximum waterline armour survived the design process (the Cover does not explain why the cut was made). On 21 February 1905 the Admiralty members of the Committee on Designs met to discuss underwater protection. They decided to keep the magazines as far as possible from the skin of the ship. Where they were 15ft or more from the skin, 2in protection should suffice; otherwise it would be 2½in. DNC was asked to consider reductions in armour to compensate for the extra weight: barbettes to be 12in–8in instead of the current 12in–10in; turrets to be reduced from 12in to 11in (consistent with maintaining balance); forward conning tower to be reduced from 12in to 11in and after conning tower reduced to 8in; slope of armour deck to be omitted in way of the magazine protection as in recent Russian ships (and the question to be considered whether the loss of protection against shellfire should be made good by thickening the belt in this area).17 In the course of design, displacement was cut from 18,000 tons to 17,900 tons and length (between perpendiculars) from 510ft to 490ft. At some point during the design process the number of 12pdr anti-torpedo guns was increased by a third, from eighteen to twenty-seven. Some of the sketch designs already showed 4in rather than 3in (12pdr) anti-torpedo guns.
Fisher was well aware of the likely impact of his revolutionary ship. He sought to build her as quickly as possible, so as to administer the greatest possible shock to other navies and also to keep all details very secret. Even the existence of the project was secret. No design had been chosen. Narbeth was not pleased to see a report in the 30 December 1904 Daily Mail that the Admiralty planned a ship armed with ten 12in guns, displacing 17,000 to 18,000 tons – nearly exactly the figures which would be chosen for HMS Dreadnought.18
When the Navy Estimates were submitted in March 1905, she was described as an experimental departure from previous practice. In April 1905 Arthur Lee, Civil Lord of the Admiralty, told a Gosport audience that the Admiralty had no intention of cutting new construction. The lull in shipbuilding had simply allowed it to assimilate the lessons of the Russo-Japanese War. The first new ship would be laid down at Portsmouth in the autumn; the dockyard would have the credit for having built the most powerful battleship in the world in the shortest time the world had ever known.19 British naval correspondents speculated that the new ship would be based on the design abandoned by the Admiralty in 1903 in favour of repeat King Edward VIIs. They were unaware that the Lord Nelson was not too different from the abandoned design, speculating that Watts had conceived something far more impressive.
Detailed design work was carried out by Portsmouth Dockyard, which would build the ship. From the first, the priority was quick construction, so Portsmouth gathered as much material as it could before laying the ship down on 2 October 1905. In the interest of speeding construction, 12in guns and mountings were taken from the two Lord Nelsons under construction, and it appears that 12pdrs were as well. Transfers from the two ships substantially slowed their construction, so that both were completed after Dreadnought had made them obsolescent. She officially began trials on 3 October 1906, although she was not entirely complete for another two months. The combination of extraordinarily quick construction and absolute secrecy was stunning. Although several other navies were contemplating all-big-gun battleships, none was ready to begin construction.
Dreadnought in the Mediterranean, 1913, photographed by the Grand Photo Studio of Malta. The most prominent modification is the canvas and pipe structure built around the two forward 12pdrs on ‘A’ turret, most likely to shield them from the glare of the two searchlights in the bridge wings. It was fitted during a 1911 refit. Work to fit a hooded 9ft rangefinder to ‘A’ turret began during a 16 March–29 May 1912 refit; she was given a temporary unarmoured rangefinder while this work was incomplete (installation was completed during a 12 February–30 April 1913 refit at Portsmouth). The 1912 refit included installation of an enlarged foretop to take a stabilised Argo 9ft rangefinder. The masthead searchlight was removed in 1910 and a frame designed to keep the steaming lights clear of the funnel exhaust fitted to the foremast. The mainmast was taken down. The structure apparently built up around the after conning tower consisted of portable flaps. The foretop was again rebuilt during a 7 May–7 June 1915 refit, this time to take a main battery director on top. At the same time the other turrets were fitted with 9ft rangefinders in armoured hoods and the 12pdrs atop ‘A’ turret were removed. In 1917 the maintop was replaced by a platform carrying three searchlights (the two lower down were removed). The two bridge wing searchlights were moved to positions on the struts of the foremast, below the top of the forefunnel. After Jutland the ship received anti-flash protection and some additional deck armour. The stern torpedo tube was removed in 1918 and the torpedo tube compartment converted to a high-angle magazine.
BY 1905, it was widely accepted that battleship and armoured cruiser designs were drawing together. For example, three years earlier the Board asked the Royal Naval War College to compare a fast battleship with reduced armour and armament with a more conventional slow battleship in a fleet action. The study was inspired by the advent of the US Navy’s Tennessee class (four 10in guns, 22 knots), which the Royal Navy (but not the US Navy) considered a fast battleship. During the design of the Minotaur class armoured cruisers, the last of their kind in the Royal Navy, a version with a nearly uniform-calibre main battery was sketched.1 It might be considered broadly equivalent to the all-big-gun versions of the Lord Nelson design sketched at about the same time.
It could be argued that the new cruisers were a halfway stage to an inevitable merger of the battleship and armoured cruiser types. Fisher once wrote that it was as impossible to prevent such a merger as to prevent a kitten from growing up into a cat. In 1906 he went further, arguing that the Invincibles were ‘perfectly fit to be in line of battle with the battle fleet and could more correctly be described as battleships which, thanks to their speed, can drive anything afloat off the seas’.2 In effect he solved the problem Lord Selborne had posed with the 2:1 ratio by merging the dreadnought and dreadnought cruiser categories into a single category of dreadnought capital ships. After three battlecruisers were destroyed at Jutland, many claimed that these ships had been misused, that they had never been intended to be part of a battle fleet. They avoided the reality that in 1916 the Royal Navy’s technical experts, such as DNC, concluded that the losses had been due, not to inadequate armour, but to suicidal magazine practices intended to make for faster fire. Battlecruisers had a variety of roles – including fighting other battlecruisers armed with battleship-calibre guns. Any ship capable of standing up to such fire had a perfectly valid