Steam battleships as a name for the transitional era

French designs and the survival of older ship-of-the-line forms complicate any label centered on the Royal Sovereign class. One proposal treats HMS Hood's low freeboard as a throwback, making her the last of an older battleship type rather than the starting point for the next period. Steam battleship instead names the propulsion system that increasingly defined the mature battleship, while steam ships of the line describes earlier transitional vessels. This distinction tracks changes in propulsion and role without assuming that every navy followed a British class boundary. Andrew Lambert's Battleships in Transition is recommended as a particularly useful account of this evolution.