Why HMS Dreadnought marks a new battleship era

HMS Dreadnought gave her name to an era of battleship design and became the practical dividing line between pre-dreadnoughts and the capital ships that followed. The label is only a rough guide, since naval development did not divide itself into tidy periods. Her heavy guns, speed, armour, and turbine machinery formed the standard against which later battleships were judged. The same design lineage ran through the battlecruiser and eventually the fast battleship, which makes Dreadnought a useful starting point for twentieth-century capital ships.