Читать книгу Deeper into the Darkness онлайн

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Before the dreadnought era, battleships and cruisers had no centralised fire control. Each gun was fired, independently of the others, from its respective turret. From 1906 onwards, battleships, and then battlecruisers, were fitted with the latest in range-finding techniques, sighting and fire control. Crucially, for the first time, all eight guns (and ten with later classes) in a broadside could be aimed and fired by one gunnery control officer positioned in an armoured chamber at the top of the conning tower just in front of the bridge – and also by a secondary gunnery control centre towards the stern of the ship. Officers in the spotting top – halfway up the foremast – observed the fall of shot, the splashes from shells landing beside the enemy ship far away in the distance, and could give suitable corrections to walk the guns in on their target.

The development of the dreadnought by Britain in 1906 could have been a colossal own goal – by destroying her traditional naval numerical supremacy in the balanced order of the time. But taking the calculated view that British shipyards could build more of the new dreadnoughts than could the shipyards of any rival countries, the Royal Navy gambled with the launch of HMS Dreadnought. They gambled – and won.