Re: Ship design and national priorities

kenney@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
Well there has been differences between ships of the same nominal type in construction and design by nation since the sailing navies.
Frigate construction for example. French frigates tended to be better sailers in light to medium wind speed than RN ships. However this was in large part down to the use of a lighter construction. Room and space was larger and waterways were used to reduce the number of knees required. As a result French frigates tended to hog after as little as three years and captured French ships in RN service had to have a lighter gun armament than UK built contemporaries. I believe there were similar differences between line of battle ships but have not seen detailed evidence.
Now the reasons for this seem to be that the RN by 1800 was expected to spend long periods at sea while the French were only expected to leave port for specific missions. One complaint about captured French ships was the lack of platforms in the hold for stowage. So here we have a difference in design produced by different national priorities.
These differences can also be seen in the ironclad period. The RN was slow to abandon rigged ships due to the need for range and thus slow to adopt the turret for anything but coastal defence ships. The need for range influenced most UK ship design up to the fifties though the existence of coaling stations helped off set some of the constraints. Still this trade off led to complaints that RN armoured cruisers were undergunned and under armoured by comparison with contemporaries. Rn ships were also usually designed with higher freeboard than others as sea-keeping was a major concern which gave rise to complaints about the large amounts of unarmoured hull.
Of course the classic example of national priorities influencing design was the first batch of treaty cruisers.
Thoughts?

Ken Young
My first thought is Britain was building trade cruisers long before the first batch of treaty cruisers.
.

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