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HMS ''Inflexible'' was a Victorian ironclad battleship carrying her main armament in centrally placed turrets. The ship was constructed in the 1870s for the Royal Navy to oppose the perceived growing threat from the Italian ''Regia Marina'' in the Mediterranean. The Italian Navy had started constructing a pair of battleships, ''Duilio'' and ''Dandolo'', equipped with four Armstrong 17.7-inch (450 mm) guns weighing 100 tons each. These were superior to the armament of any ship in the British Mediterranean Squadron, and ''Inflexible'' was designed as a counter to them. ''Inflexible'' mounted larger guns than those of any previous British warship and had the thickest armour ever to be fitted to a Royal Navy ship. Controversially, she was designed so that if her un-armoured ends should be seriously damaged in action and become water-logged, the buoyancy of the armoured centre section of the ship would keep her afloat and upright. The ship was the first major warship to depend in part for the protection of her buoyancy by a horizontal armoured deck below the water-line rather than armoured sides along the waterline. ==Design== The original concept was based upon an outline design similar to that for HMS ''Dreadnought'', but with improved armament. The ship was conceptually constructed from three components, several outline studies being produced by Nathaniel Barnaby. *A heavily armoured citadel wide and long located amidships which would keep the ship afloat and stable regardless of what happened to the ends. This citadel contained the main guns, the boilers and the engines. * Unarmoured ends, but with a armoured deck 6–8 ft below the waterline to limit damage to the underwater section to keep them buoyant. Coal bunkers were located over the armoured deck and surrounded by compartments filled with cork. The ship had bunker capacity for 400 tons of coal below the deck for use during combat, when the above-deck bunkers would be inaccessible and possibly flooded. The structure above the armoured deck also contained a large number of watertight compartments to further preserve buoyancy. * A light superstructure to provide crew accommodation, and freeboard in rough weather, although anticipated to be seriously damaged in any major engagement. Barnaby wanted a ship both broader than existing designs to mimimise rolling and as short as possible to reduce its size as a target. Making a ship broader compared to its length was known to reduce its speed, so the innovative technique of water tank tests on models, pioneered by William Froude, was used to finalise a design. This was ten feet wider than ''Duillo'' and twenty-one feet shorter, the smallest ever ratio of length to breadth in a metal first class warship.〔Padfield p.84〕 Once the outline design was agreed, the detailed architectural design was done by William White and she was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 24 February 1874. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「HMS Inflexible (1876)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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