The roughly forty-five years from HMS Warrior to Dreadnought can be divided into distinct technological eras instead of treated as one undifferentiated prelude. Steam battleships occupy the transition between ironclads and the Royal Sovereign generation. Their designers combined armour, guns, machinery, and hull forms in unusual ways while learning how these systems worked together. The results were capable ships built for the tactics and industries of their own time, rather than incomplete dreadnoughts.
Chapter · 1:11-3:23
Why call them steam battleships?
Calling them pre-dreadnoughts makes 1870s and 1880s battleships sound like failed versions of a design their builders could not have known.