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.
Read more about this topic: USS Maine (ACR-1)
Famous quotes containing the word design:
“To nourish children and raise them against odds is in any time, any place, more valuable than to fix bolts in cars or design nuclear weapons.”
—Marilyn French (20th century)
“For I choose that my remembrances of him should be pleasing, affecting, religious. I will love him as a glorified friend, after the free way of friendship, and not pay him a stiff sign of respect, as men do to those whom they fear. A passage read from his discourses, a moving provocation to works like his, any act or meeting which tends to awaken a pure thought, a flow of love, an original design of virtue, I call a worthy, a true commemoration.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life ... for fear that I should get some of his good done to me,—some of its virus mingled with my blood.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)