USS Maine (ACR-1) - Design

Design

Maine's building time of nine years was unusually protracted, due to the limits of U.S. industry at the time. (The delivery of her armored plating took three years). A fire in the yard's drafting room, where Maine's working set of blueprints were stored, caused further delay. In those nine years, naval tactics and technology changed radically and left Maine's actual role in the navy ill–defined. At the time she was laid down, armored cruisers such as Maine, were intended to serve as small battleships on overseas service and were built with heavy belt armor. Great Britain, France and Russia had constructed such ships to serve this purpose and sold others of this type, including the Riachuelo, to second–rate navies. Within a decade, this role had changed to commerce raiding, for which fast, long–range vessels, with only limited armor protection, were needed. The advent of lightweight armor, such as Harvey steel, made this transformation possible.˝

As a result of these changing priorities, Maine was caught between two separate positions and could not perform either one adequately. She lacked both the armor and firepower to serve as a ship–of–the–line against enemy battleships and the speed to serve as a cruiser. Nevertheless, she was still expected to fulfil more than one tactical function. In addition, because of the potential of a warship sustaining blast damage to herself from cross–deck and end–on fire, Maine's main–gun arrangement was obsolete by the time she entered service.