Lion-class battlecruiser
The Lion class was a pair of battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy before World War I. The ships were a significant improvement over their predecessors of the Indefatigable class in terms of speed, armament and armour. Lion served as the flagship of the Grand Fleet’s battlecruiser throughout the war. She sank the German light cruiser Cöln during the Battle of Heligoland Bight in August 1914.
About Lion-class battlecruiser in brief
The Lion class was a pair of battlecruisers built for the Royal Navy before World War I. The ships were a significant improvement over their predecessors of the Indefatigable class in terms of speed, armament and armour. Lion served as the flagship of the Grand Fleet’s battlecruiser throughout the war. She sank the German light cruiser Cöln during the Battle of Heligoland Bight in August 1914. She participated in the battles of Dogger Bank in 1915 and Jutland the following year. Both ships were present during the inconclusive Action of 19 August 1916. The sister ships spent the rest of the war on uneventful patrols in the North Sea. In 1920 they were put into reserve and were then sold for scrap a few years later in accordance with the terms of the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922. Their layout was adapted from the design of the first “super-dreadnought” class, the Orion-class battleships of 1910, with 13. 5-inch guns. They had a height of 6.4 feet at deep load and a beam of 88 feet 6 inches at deep. They displaced 26,270 tons at normal load and 30,820 long tons at load, over 8,000 tons more than the earlier ships. The Lions were significantly significantly larger than the predecessors of their predecessors. They were the first battlecruising ships to be armed with the new 13.5-inch Mk V gun. The design was intended to maintain qualitative superiority over the new German dreadnoughts then under construction. The increase in speed, armour and gun size forced a 40% increase in size and made them the largest warships in the world.
The Lion-class battle Cruisers were designed to be as superior to the German Moltke class as the German ships were to the Invincible class. They suffered from an inability of the en echelon amidships turrets to safely fire across deck, limiting them to a three-turret broadside. As such, all four turrets in the Lions were arranged on the centreline; ‘Q’ turret was located amidship and could only fire on the broadside, and this was done because the greater size and weight of the new guns rendered wing turrets impracticable. The Director of Naval Construction, Sir Philip Watts, suggested that a fifth turret, superfiring over the rear turret, could be added if the ship was lengthened by three frames, 12 feet in total. This was not approved, possibly because of doubts about its feasibility, and possibly because there were doubts about the ship’s firepower. The ship metacentricric load at 6.6 feet deep at deep load and 6.5 feet at normal load at normal load, over 270 tons at normal deep load. The battleship was sunk by the German armoured cruiser Blücher at the Second Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914, and the battleship suffered a serious cordite fire that could have destroyed the ship. In July 1909, the Government announced in July 1909 that the contingency ships would also be built.
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