Lord Nelson-class battleship
HMS Agamemnon
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| Class overview | |
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| Name: | Lord Nelson class |
| Builders: | Palmers Shipbuilding and Iron Company, William Beardmore and Company |
| Operators: |
 Royal Navy
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| Preceded by: | Swiftsure class |
| Succeeded by: | HMS Dreadnought |
| Cost: |
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| Built: | 1905–08 |
| In commission: | 1908–19 |
| Completed: | 2 |
| Scrapped: | 2 |
| General characteristics | |
| Type: | Pre-dreadnought battleship |
| Displacement: |
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| Length: | 443 ft 6 in (135.18 m) |
| Beam: | 79 ft 6 in (24.23 m) |
| Draught: | 26 ft 0 in (8 m) |
| Installed power: | 16,750 ihp (12,490 kW) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: | 18 knots (33 km/h; 21 mph) |
| Range: |
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| Complement: |
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| Armament: |
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| Armour: |
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| Notes: | Agamemnon served as a radio-controlled target ship 1923–1926 |
The Lord Nelson class was a two-ship class of pre-dreadnought battleships built by the Royal Navy between 1905 and 1908. Although they were the last British pre-dreadnoughts, both were completed and commissioned after HMS Dreadnought had entered service. Lord Nelson and Agamemnon were serving in the Channel Fleet when World War I began in 1914. They were both transferred to the Mediterranean Sea in early 1915 to participate in the Dardanelles Campaign. They remained there, assigned to the Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, which was later redesignated the Aegean Squadron, to prevent the German battlecruiser SMS Goeben and her consort Breslau from breaking out into the Mediterranean. Both ships returned to the United Kingdom in 1919. Lord Nelson was placed into reserve upon her arrival and sold for scrap in June 1920, but Agamemnon was converted into a radio-controlled target ship before being sold for scrap in 1927, the last surviving British pre-dreadnought.
The Lord Nelson-class battleships were designed and built at a time when the direction of future battleship construction was controversial. On the one hand, naval combat during the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–1905 suggested that engagement ranges would increase to the point that intermediate and secondary batteries would become far less important and perhaps even ineffective, and that smaller-calibre guns would be useless in combat between capital ships; on the other hand, the lower rate of fire of battleship main batteries raised questions about the prudence of building all-big-gun battleships, for fear that they might be overwhelmed by the higher rate of fire of intermediate-calibre guns in the shorter-range engagements that might occur in fog or bad weather or at night. In the end, the all-big-gun battleships, which became known as dreadnoughts after the first such ship, Dreadnought, were vindicated, but this was by no means clear when the Lord Nelsons were designed in 1904 or even by the time they were laid down in 1905.
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Wikipedia