USS Indiana (BB-1)
USS Indiana between 1900 and 1908.
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| History | |
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 United States
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| Name: | Indiana |
| Namesake: | State of Indiana |
| Ordered: | 30 June 1890 |
| Builder: | William Cramp & Sons Ship & Engine Building Co. |
| Laid down: | 7 May 1891 |
| Launched: | 28 February 1893 |
| Sponsored by: | Jessie Miller |
| Commissioned: | 20 November 1895 |
| Decommissioned: | 24 December 1903 |
| Recommissioned: | 9 January 1906 |
| Decommissioned: | 23 May 1914 |
| Identification: | Hull symbol: BB-1 |
| Recommissioned: | 24 May 1917 |
| Decommissioned: | 31 January 1919 |
| Renamed: | Coast Battleship Number 1 on 29 March 1919 |
| Fate: |
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| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Indiana-class pre-dreadnought battleship |
| Displacement: | 10,288 long tons (10,453 t) (standard) |
| Length: | |
| Beam: | 69 ft 3 in (21.11 m) (wl) |
| Draft: | 27 ft (8.2 m) |
| Installed power: | 4 × double ended Scotch boilers (design) |
| Propulsion: |
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| Speed: | 15 kn (28 km/h; 17 mph) (design) |
| Range: | 4,900 nmi (9,100 km; 5,600 mi) |
| Complement: | 32 officers 441 men |
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| General characteristics (Later refits) | |
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USS Indiana (BB-1) was the lead ship of her class and the first battleship in the United States Navy comparable to foreign battleships of the time. Authorized in 1890 and commissioned five years later, she was a small battleship, though with heavy armor and ordnance. The ship also pioneered the use of an intermediate battery. She was designed for coastal defense and as a result, her decks were not safe from high waves on the open ocean.
Indiana served in the Spanish–American War (1898) as part of the North Atlantic Squadron. She took part in both the blockade of Santiago de Cuba and the battle of Santiago de Cuba, which occurred when the Spanish fleet attempted to break through the blockade. Although unable to join the chase of the escaping Spanish cruisers, she was partly responsible for the destruction of the Spanish destroyers Plutón and Furor. After the war she quickly became obsolete—despite several modernizations—and spent most of her time in commission as a training ship or in the reserve fleet, with her last commission during World War I as a training ship for gun crews. She was decommissioned for the third and final time in January 1919 and was shortly after reclassified Coast Battleship Number 1 so that the name Indiana could be reused. She was sunk in shallow water as a target in aerial bombing tests in 1920 and her hull was sold for scrap in 1924.
Indiana was constructed from a modified version of a design drawn up by a US navy policy board in 1889 for a short-range battleship. The original design was part of an ambitious naval construction plan to build 33 battleships and 167 smaller ships. The United States Congress saw the plan as an attempt to end the U.S. policy of isolationism and did not approve it, but a year later the United States House of Representatives approved funding for three coast defense battleships, which would become Indiana and her sister ships Massachusetts and Oregon. The "coast defense" designation was reflected in Indiana's moderate endurance, relatively small displacement and low freeboard, or distance from the deck to the water, which limited seagoing capability. She was however heavily armed and armored; Conway's All The World's Fighting Ships describes her design as "attempting too much on a very limited displacement."
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Wikipedia