Maximum Battleship
The "maximum battleships", also known as the "Tillman Battleships" were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 to the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) of the United States Navy. The Navy itself was not interested in the designs and drew them up to win support from the Committee on Naval Affairs, on which Tillman sat. Nevertheless, they helped influence design work on the Pennsylvania and first South Dakota classes of battleships. The plans prepared for the senator were preserved by C&R in the first of its "Spring Styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925.
Senator Tillman had grown impatient with the Navy's requests for larger battleships every year as well as the Navy's habit of building battleships significantly larger than Congress authorized. He accordingly instructed the Navy to design "maximum battleships", the largest battleships that they could use.
The only limits on the potential size of an American battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the Panama Canal. The locks measure roughly 1,000 by 110 feet (300 by 34 m), and so the "maximum battleships" were 975 feet (297 m) long and 108 feet (33 m) in beam. Draft was limited to 39.5 ft (12.04 m).
Read more about Maximum Battleship: Designs
Famous quotes containing the word maximum:
“Only at his maximum does an individual surpass all his derivative elements, and become purely himself. And most people never get there. In his own pure individuality a man surpasses his father and mother, and is utterly unknown to them.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)