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The battlecruiser was developed by the Royal Navy in the first years of the 20th century as an evolution of the armoured cruiser. [5] The first armoured cruisers had been built in the 1870s, as an attempt to give armour protection to ships fulfilling the typical cruiser roles of patrol, trade protection and power projection.
At around the same time as the battlecruiser was developed, the distinction between the armored and the unarmored cruiser finally disappeared. By the British Town class , the first of which was launched in 1909, it was possible for a small, fast cruiser to carry both belt and deck armor, particularly when turbine engines were adopted.
The four ships of this class would have been larger, faster, and more heavily armed than any existing battleship (although several projected foreign ships would be larger). The "battlecruiser" designation came from their higher speed and lesser firepower and armour relative to the planned N3-class battleship design. The G3s would have carried ...
Napoléon (1850), the world's first steam-powered battleship. A ship of the line was a large, unarmored wooden sailing ship which mounted a battery of up to 120 smoothbore guns and carronades, which came to prominence with the adoption of line of battle tactics in the early 17th century and the end of the sailing battleship's heyday in the 1830s.
Battlecruiser, a ship with battleship-level armament and cruiser-level armour; typically faster than a battleship because the reduction in armour allowed mounting of more powerful propulsion machinery, or the use of a more slender hull shape with a lower drag coefficient. Cruiser, a fast, independent warship. Traditionally, cruisers were the ...
The battleship design for the following year's programme, which became the Revenge class, also had 15-inch guns, but reverted to the 21-knot speed of the main battlefleet. Again, no battlecruiser was included, a decision which suggests that the fast battleships were perceived at that time as superseding the battlecruiser concept.
The difference between these ships and ones that would follow with the heavy cruiser were almost as pronounced as that between the armoured cruiser and the battlecruiser. One reason for this difference was the intended mission of these ships. They were not intended to serve as a junior battleship, as the armoured cruiser had been, and were not ...
The first battlecruisers were designed in the United Kingdom, in the first decade of the century, as a development of the armoured cruiser, at the same time as the dreadnought succeeded the pre-dreadnought battleship. The original aim of the battlecruiser was to hunt down slower, older armoured cruisers and destroy them with heavy gunfire.