Dreadnought Battleship

The dreadnought was a revolutionary type of battleship inaugurated by the Royal Navy's HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, which rendered every existing battleship in the world's navies obsolete virtually overnight by combining an all-big-gun armament of uniform heavy caliber with steam turbine propulsion that gave it superior speed to older mixed-armament battleships. The design, championed by First Sea Lord Admiral John Fisher, allowed a dreadnought to engage effectively at far longer ranges than earlier ships, whose secondary and tertiary gun batteries of varying calibers had complicated fire control, and its introduction triggered an intense international naval arms race, most consequentially between Britain and Imperial Germany, that became a significant contributing tension in the lead-up to World War I. Dreadnought-type battleships and their larger "super-dreadnought" successors formed the core of the major naval powers' battle fleets through World War I, culminating in the largest clash of dreadnought fleets in history at the 1916 Battle of Jutland between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet. The type's dominance of naval doctrine persisted until aircraft carriers demonstrated their own decisive striking power during World War II.