Naval History Forums

HMS Hercules was the last and the best of the British 12 inch dreadnoughts.

Length 541 feet 6 inches waterline 545 feet 9 inches overall, 86 feet 8 inch beam, draught 29feet 5 inch deep, displacement 20,030 tons load 23,266 tons deep.
With Belt armour ranging from 7 to 11inches, barbette and turret armour is 11 inches at its thickest
10 x 12in 50cal MK XI (5 x 2), 16 x 4in (16 x 1), 4 x 3 pounder (4 x 1), 3 x 21in TT
21 knots top speed

http://www.worldwar1.co.uk/battleship/colossus-line.gif

She fired 98 rounds of 12 inch at Jutland (which reputedely was mainly HE ammo) and was credited with hits on Seydlitz

http://s744.photobucket.com/albums/xx88 ... 0Hercules/

Hercules is a hard ship to find decent photos of on the net

With those wing turrets it looks the last of the line for WW1.

Note from the photobucket album the very tall mast, soaring above the crows nest.

I've been re-hashing my photobucket so heres the Hercules picture links again

http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx88 ... 1291300981

http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx88 ... 1291301019

http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx88 ... 1291301060

http://i744.photobucket.com/albums/xx88 ... 1291301097

The last one is actually her sister ship HMS Colossus but its a nice picture so enjoy

I always thought that this class of ship would have looked better with a 2nd mast located aft - anyone agree?

It looks like a lot to the Argentina's two dreadnoughts.

Nice looking ships. Thanks for the pics!

Hercules and sister Colossus may have looked better with 2 masts.

There was no need.
Fire control was moving rapidly onwards and it was their half sister Neptune where it was first fitted in the fore top.
Neptune was the last to carry both fore and main masts.
H and C also had the fore mast abaft the fore funnel, whilst Neptune had hers fwd of it, better for those up in the foretop but still pretty dire.

None of the three, Neptune, Colossus or Hercules advanced the type.

That was already building in the shape of the Super Dreadnoughts of the Orion class

culverin wrote:Fire control was moving rapidly onwards and it was their half sister Neptune where it was first fitted in the fore top.

What fire control was that?

Thanks for pointing out that error Simon. Poor planning on my part.

It should read,
Director control was moving rapidly onwards and it was their half sister Neptune where it was first fitted in the fore top.
Additionally, to further clarify this, Neptunes director was the first to be retained after installation, in December 1910.

Previously, gun directors had been in Hero, Africa, Good Hope and Bellerophon, then all removed.

Hercules and sister Colossus had theirs installed later in 1915.

culverin wrote:Thanks for pointing out that error Simon. Poor planning on my part.

It should read,
Director control was moving rapidly onwards and it was their half sister Neptune where it was first fitted in the fore top.
Additionally, to further clarify this, Neptunes director was the first to be retained after installation, in December 1910.

Previously, gun directors had been in Hero, Africa, Good Hope and Bellerophon, then all removed.

Hercules and sister Colossus had theirs installed later in 1915.

..... Here is an interesting tidbit on GF director control

It is an article of indisputable faith that only two ships of the GF present at Jutland lacked directors. I discovered recently (see Fawcett & Hooper’s “The Fighting at Jutland”) that this assertion, while technically correct, is not an altogether accurate representation of the facts. While BELLEROPHON did in fact have a director fitted aboard, its installation had not actually been completed by the time of Jutland and she fought without the use of it.

The devil is always in the details.


B

Byron, does the person in question specifically state that the director gear wasn't operational? I'm rather loath to trust Fawcett & Hooper after I discovered a number of discrepancies in the account of Lion's gunnery officer.

One of the battle cruisers didn't use director firing at Jutland because it had only been recently installed and the captain didn't want to use it. One of the 12-in ones. For the life of me I can't find the reference - must be in Max Arthur's stupidly named "Lost Voices from the Royal Navy".

Simon

simonharley wrote:Byron, does the person in question specifically state that the director gear wasn't operational? I'm rather loath to trust Fawcett & Hooper after I discovered a number of discrepancies in the account of Lion's gunnery officer.

One of the battle cruisers didn't use director firing at Jutland because it had only been recently installed and the captain didn't want to use it. One of the 12-in ones. For the life of me I can't find the reference - must be in Max Arthur's stupidly named "Lost Voices from the Royal Navy".

Simon

Simon,
The Bellerophon commentary in TFAJ (p.181) reads as follows - "We therefore tried to shift our fire to the enemy battleships which were slowly crossing behind the cruiser, but they were hardly visible except for the gun flashes, and as none of the gunlayers could see them at all and we were not yet fitted up properly with director firing, we had to come back to firing at the cruiser again."

Yates's doctoral dissertation "Jutland Controversy" identifies INFLEXIBLE as the ship which decided to forego use of its very new director installation. Yates cites a statement of one Midshipman Frank Layard (Dumaresq operator among the FC party) - "We had only done one test firing with our new firing system a day or two before leaving Scapa. The Gunnery Officer therefore had a difficult decision to make. Should he use the new system which, though more efficient, was virtually untried, or ... revert to the old less accurate but well tested system of gunlayer firing? He decided not to risk using the new Director System and so, throughout the action, guns and turrets were individually laid and trained."

What discrepancies did you note in TFAJ re the commentary of Lion's gunnery officer?


Byron

Reading the above post comments I was wondering if the less accurate firing would be an incidental or significant factor in the ships destruction? Insofar that the German ships firing on Inflexible weren't under sufficient fire?

RF, you are confusing the 3 sisters.
It was Invincible sunk at Jutland. Her gunnery was rather good in fact.
Both her sisters Inflexible and Indomitable came through unscathed.

Yes, you are right.

The similarities in names can sometimes be confusing, particulary when these ships serve together.

Studies of hit rates at Jutland does not really support the oft stated belief that a ship not under fire would fire with greater accuracy than a ship not under fire, at least not in the short perspective. Other factors seem to play a much larger part.