The name ‘battleship’ comes from ‘line-of-battle ship’, the name given to the large ships of the Napoleonic Wars that fought in a line. It refers to a capital ship (the term for large warships which are responsible for sea control) with big guns as its primary armament and carrying heavy armor. Battleships in various forms dominated the seas from the 1860s (when the first armored warships appeared) until WW2, when aircraft developed enough to dethroned them. There are no battleships in service today, and the only battleships to see active service since 1960 are the Iowa class.

HMS Warrior (preserved at Portsmouth, England)

The lineage of the modern battleship starts with HMS Warrior, launched in 1860, the first iron-hulled armored warship. She was followed by a bewildering array of other ships. Turrets appeared, and improvements in steam engines allowed sails to be discarded.

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Naval Gazing originated as a series of comments in the open threads of a blog called Slate Star Codex. Someone asked about hobbies, and I began to talk about my tour-guiding, followed by a version of my fire-control spiel. I then spent about the next eight months posting stuff there before I moved to Oklahoma and started Naval Gazing as an independent blog. These are links to those original posts. At this point, they're essentially of historical interest only. With a few very minor exceptions, everything discussed there has also been covered here, usually in significantly greater detail. Originally, the asterisks were a system for keeping track of which ones had been revised.

Series Intro*

History:

• General History of Battleships, Part 1*, Part 2*
• The Early Ironclads*
• Pre-Dreadnoughts*
• Pursuit of the Goeben and Breslau*
• The Battle of Jutland Part 1*, Part 2*, Part 3*, Part 4*, Part 5*, Part 6*
• US Battleships in WW2*
• The Battleships of Pearl Harbor Part 1*, Part 2*, Part 3*
• Rest-of-world Battleships in WW2*
• Battlecruisers*
• Battleships after WW2*
• The Destroyer that accidentally attacked a President*
• The loss of HMS Victoria*
• The South American Dreadnought Race*
• Dreadnoughts of the minor powers*
• Life aboard Iowa*
• Network-centric Warfare Part 1*, Part 2*
• History of Naval Aviation (hlynkacg) Part 1
• Warship Types of WWI and WWII*
  
  Technical:
• Fire Control, Part 1*, Part 2* (Old)
• History of Fire Control
• Armor Part 1*, Part 2*
• Propulsion*
• Armament Part 1*, Part 2*
• Turret vs barbette*
• Underwater protection*
• Secondary Armament Part 1*, Part 2*
• Survivability and Damage Control Part 1*, Part 2*
• Mine Warfare Part 1*, Part 2*
  
  Modern Naval:
• Why the carriers are not doomed Part 1*, Part 2*, Part 3*, Part 4*
• AEGIS*
• Strike Warfare*
  
  Misc:
• Naval Bibliography*
• Thoughts on tour guiding*
• Questions I get as a tour guide*
• Thoughts on the Summer 2017 Collisions