| abstract
| - If your still not convinced how badass this ship is, it's name was immortalized by Star Trek.
* Turbinia, the first successful steam turbine powered ship. When built she was the fastest ship afloat, capable of 34.5 knots. Her builder demonstrated this at the Spithead Naval review in 1897 when he decided to arrive unannounced and buzzed the assembled warships before outrunning every picket ship sent to stop her. This demonstration was so successful, that the Royal Navy decided that all future ships would be powered by turbines, leading to...
* HMS Dreadnought. Admiral Jackie Fisher was made head of the Royal Navy because he had a plan to economize on naval expenditure. That plan involved using submarines to defend against invasions and building battleships that were bigger and faster than anything else in service. Dreadnought was the prototype of these and was probably the most famous ship in the world until the Titanic sank- when it came out other nations suspended their battleship programmes for a while to adjust to it. Hell, in naval history parlance the prewar years are often called the Dreadnought Era.
* And previous genereations of battleships were collectively renamed as "predreadnoughts". The Dreadnought also carries the distinction of being the only battleship in WWI to sink a submarine - by ramming, no less.
* One of the cooler dreadnoughts was the Queen Elizabeth-class battleship HMS Warspite, which, despite being a Floating Disaster Area, managed to distinguish itself fighting in both world wars. A good example of the Warspite's career would be her service at the Battle of Jutland, where she was attached to Admiral Beatty's battlecruiser squadron, sustained fifteen direct hits and nearly sinking, before having her steering jam while trying to avoid a collision with the Valiant. With her steering jammed, she end up floating in circles, drawing the fire of the German battlecruisers away from the badly damaged Warrior, whose crew were thus able to abandon ship. When the Warspite's crew managed to regain control of her steering, it incidentally put her on a direct course for the German fleet, with only one turret still capable of operating and no rangefinders or fire control. Despite this, she was still able to fire twelve shots under local control before she was finally ordered to withdraw for repairs.
* Before aircraft carriers evolved into their current, more standardised, forms, one notable design was the converted Courageous-class cruisers, which had two separate decks: the hangar opened directly onto a shorter flying-off deck at the front of the ship, with a longer landing deck built on the floor above. At the same time, the Japanese carrier Akagi took this a step further, with three flight decks stacked above one another. The designs proved to be inefficient, but both win major cool points.
* The Deutschland-class heavy cruisers of the Reichsmarine (later the Kriegsmarine). Due to restrictions imposed by the post-WWI Treaty of Versailles, the Germans basically did everything they could to pack a battleship's power onto a boat the size of a cruiser. While this resulted in a ship with several design compromises (such as relatively thin armor), its power and capabilities were such Nightmare Fuel to the British that they started referring to the ships as "pocket battleships." The other ships of the class were called the Admiral Scheer and the infamous Admiral Graf Spee (which, to cut a long story short, was scuttled by its captain to avoid what he thought would be a losing battle). The Deutschland was later renamed as the Lützow.
* Though never passing beyond the experimental stage, the Habbakuk would have qualified in both senses, being a ship constructed out of ice.
* The Yamato. Largest battleship made (surpassed in military vessel size only by the Nimitz supercarriers), which automatically makes it a Cool Boat, even if it was sunk before causing much damage. Also, the anime Uchuu Senkan Yamato turned it into a Cool Starship, which has to earn it extra points.
* The German battleships Bismarck and Tirpitz deserve a mention, too. Although not quite as big as the Yamato, they were still larger and more heavily armed than nearly any Allied ship and terrorised the north Atlantic. After Bismarck was destroyed in battle against several British warships, Tirpitz retreated to a naval base in Norway, but it still scared the Allies British enough for them to stage an epic commando raid to deny it a dry dock in France and later a massive air raid in order to sink it (they did, after hitting it with a dozen bombs. Two of the craters left by the bombs that missed are used as artificial lakes today).
* Both qualify for "Awesome but impractical". It took the firepower of an entire fleet to take out the immobilized Bismarck, and bombs specifically designed for this purpose to sink the Tirpitz.
* On the other hand, an entire fleet of submarines could have been built with the resources for just one of those ships...
* They were a flawed design though, their 3 shafts gave less manoeuvrability than the 4 employed by all the other navies of the time, and the central shaft weakened the rear keel where it ran through it (in actual fact it was weak enough that the Bismark's aft separated on the way down).
* The Bismarck stands out in memory for performing the feat of blowing up Britain's favorite battlecruiser, the Hood, almost before the battle had really started (luck played its part there, to be sure, but still) and for her own arguably heroic last stand against an overwhelming force only days afterwards -- both on her very first actual mission. I'd like to draw a direct parallel to the Titanic, which is likewise remembered first and foremost for that tragic encounter with the iceberg on her maiden voyage...I think the fate of both ships captured the public imagination in a similar fashion. How well either might have done in practice if their respective careers had lasted longer doesn't really affect the myths built around them anymore.
* The Iowa class battleships, rather than going for the Awesome but Impractical that the Yamato turned out to be, were smaller, faster, and while not as extravagantly armed and armored as the better-known Japanese battleships, had plenty of weapons and armor for the war. It should be noted that Iowa class battleships were the only true battleships to be kept in serious service past World War Two, continually updated with new weapons. Still impractical nowadays, and they are now effectively retired, but no other ship in this section of the list, including the famed-but-terminally impractical Yamato, is still in service.
* It was definitely as extravagantly armored as the Yamato, just in a different way. The sheer amount of amazingness that resulted from it being designed without cost as an object is simply stunning. All other countries saved homogenous armor for key locations such as engines and the bridge. The Iowas were simply built of the world's finest homogenous armor. Then there's the superlative armor design. There's a reason that the penetration calculations for hits on the Iowas and Yamatos are surprisingly close. Add in their 16" rifles having the best AP shell in the world (about as good as the 18.1" shells on the Yamato), the only fire control system capable of letting the ship maneuver and fire at the same time (employing the Mark 1A Fire Control Computer), and an AA suite to put anything else to shame, and they're quite arguably a far superior warship to the 50% heavier Yamatos. They'd have been about equal surface combatants and were hugely better at AA and much better strategically (Think about the fuel consumption on a 70,000 ton battleship).
* ...I'll be in my bunk.
* The North Carolina class battleships, particularly the North Carolina herself. She was originally stationed in the Atlantic to so that she would be available to fight the Tirpitz. When the Tirpitz was a no-show, she was stationed to the Pacific, becoming the first new ship to arrive in the theatre since Pearl Harbor. From there she spent her first few months escorting the Enterprise. During the Battle for Guadalcanal, the North Carolina laid down such an incredible amount of anti-air that the captain of the Enterprise radioed in to ask if she was on fire.
* The USCGC Taney, a Treasury-class cutter and the only surviving vessel that fought at Pearl Harbor. Currently parked in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
* The carrier USS Yorktown (CV-5) surely has to qualify, I mean, come on, 2 torpedoes plus the concussion from a destroyer's magazines, and it still took her over a day to sink, plus the 2 torpedoes the day before, and 3 bombs the day before that. That ship was one tough mother.
* GTS Finnjet, the fastest conventional ferry ever built. Able to hit 33.5 knots on gas turbines and diesels, had a strengthened bow for handling sea ice. Legends abound of outrunning newer fast craft and rescuing an icebreaker during a particularly hard winter.
* Two absurdly dangerous ships that don't receive much attention. The two first true minelayers, Amur and its sister-ship Yenisey (named after the rivers on Far East) carried 300 sea mines each, and at that time the Russian Empire probably has the best ones. The co-designer and captain of Yenisey was a proponent of the offensive minelaying (as in, "after a minelayer's stern vanishes with the morning mist, you still have a port, but can neither exit nor enter it") and inventor of the system spawning minefields at 10 knots. When these ships were designed, the Russo-Japanese war was unconceivable. It was a weapon made to "end the Great Game in checkmate" (together with the rest of Russian and allied Japanese fleet, of course) and most likely able to do it, not to hide in a port each morning. In the war for which they weren't made minelayers haven't much accomplishments, but 14 May 1904 Hatsuse and Yashima blew up and sunk in a minefield near Port Arthur, left by Amur on their patrol route -- and that was two Japanese battleships more than the whole Russian fleet managed to destroy at Tsushima. This minefield was mere 1/6 of the Amur's full load and not quite the sort of tactics this ship was supposed to use.
* The Italian Navy always got Awesome but Impractical capital ships (the cruisers were fast than anything in their tonnage but had little armor, and the battleships had the speed, heavy armor and more firepower this side the American and Japanese World War II battleships but had very little range), but their torpedo boats... Well, during World War I the two best battleships of the Austrian Navy left the port to engage battle with one of them embarking a troupe to film their victory, and two torpedo boats popped out of nowhere and sank the other battleship so the troupe could record that.
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