By the late 1850's the world's larger navies were predominantly steam-driven, although wooden ships were still the order of the day. Many countries had experimented with iron-built steam-powered ships, but the French were the first to launch an iron-armoured warship - the Gloire - in 1859.
Her thick iron plating laid over a more-or-less conventional wooden hull rendered her practically impervious to existing naval gunnery. Britain could not allow her traditional enemy to gain the upper-hand at sea, and the race for naval supremacy was on.
The First Ironclads
HMS Warrior and HMS Black Prince - innovative iron warships whose iron armour was strengthened with thick teak - were built as an answer to the Gloire and her sisters. HMS Warrior was commissioned in 1861. But, these were basically just updated wooden ships in design, and were rendered obsolete - along with every other naval ship afloat - by the Battle of The Hampton Roads in March 1862.
This was the first occasion that two purpose-built, solely steam-powered ironclad warships engaged each other in combat. A major innovation in warship design - the Monitor's rotating turret - allowed her guns to remain trained on the target irrespective of her direction of travel - a naval first. The CSS Virginia and USS Monitor spent most of the day pounding each other without any appreciable result.
Warship design criteria changed overnight. A thickly armoured deck and sides became de rigeur, as did breech-loading guns that fired explosive shells more accurately than the more common smooth-bored weapons of the time. A low profile kept most of the ship underwater, and out of the reach of damaging shot.
In the late 1860's Sir Edward Reed, the chief designer for the Royal Navy, had been experimenting with broad beam designs. The theory was that the broader the beam, the more armour a given waterline length would be able to carry without adding to displacement. He actually designed a circular ship for use as a shore battery of the coast of England, but it was never built.
The Popoffkas
Russia's brilliant naval designer, Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popoff, had also been toying with a circular design. Part of the Imperial Navy's needs were for shallow-draught, heavily gunned ships capable of being used for shore bombardments in support of land troops.
The circular design met all the requirements. He sold the idea to Tsar Nicholas II, who became an enthusiastic patron of the Popoffka (as he named the ships in honour of their designer) and, after water tank and river testing with very large models, the construction of ten ships to be used as floating forts on the Black Sea was given the Imperial nod.
The first of these - the Novgorod - was launched in 1874. Almost immediately her shortcomings became alarmingly evident. As she had no conventional keel, directional stability was a problem - she was almost impossible to steer in a straight line at any speed. Compounding this problem was the fact that each of her six engines - which drove her at a top speed of 6 knots - drove its own shaft. Synchronising six engine speeds to obtain equal thrust proved an engineer-officer's nightmare. Her extremely shallow draft of 12' 4" (3.75m) and wide beam of 101' (30.78m) caused her to pitch and toss violently in any but the calmest seas. This made accurate gunnery extremely difficult to achieve.
The main armament itself caused problems. The two 11" (279mm) muzzle-loading rifled guns, weighing in at 26 tons each, were mounted in a centrally located open barbette. To reload them the crew had to forgo the protection of the barbette's armoured wall, and stand on the exposed foredeck crew-housing roof to shove the heavy charges and projectiles down the monster gun barrels. Each gun was mounted on its own turntable to facilitate individual aiming and firing.
Unfortunately the laws of physics saw to it that when a single gun was fired, the recoil would send the ship spinning on its axis - a design flaw exacerbated by the lack of a water-gripping keel. Even the addition of underwater strakes to the rear of the hull did not provide any appreciable solution to this problem. A novel gunnery technique was improvised that had the gun captain elevate his weapon for the correct range, and then fire the weapon as the target swung past his sights. This technique did nothing to improve her, already notable shortcomings in the accuracy department.
But, the authorities were very happy with the new ship, and a second, larger, one - the Admiral Popoff - was launched in 1876. Eventually even the Imperial Russian Navy came to see the shortcomings of these new ships, and the remaining eight were never built. After the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-78, the Popov and Novgorod were relegated to the role of anchored gun batteries. They would be towed into position, and securely anchored using at least three anchors on very taut chains. Care would be taken, while anchoring. that the funnels did not block the guns' ability to fire on any likely target.
For all their faults the Popoffkas were the most powerful ships afloat in the Black Sea at the time, and played a useful role keeping the Turks - Russia's traditional enemy in that area - under control until more conventional warships could be designed and built.
The Livadia
A sequel to the sad tale of the Popoffskas was the building of an Imperial yacht to the same design principles. The Tsar had been so impressed by the promised stability of the Popoffska design that he thought a similar ship would lessen the Empress Maria Alexandrovna's tendency to sea-sickness when travelling by sea.
The Livadia - named after the Imperial palace at Yalta - was built at the John Elder & Co. shipyards in Clydebank, Scotland. The first leg of her delivery voyage, from Glasgow to Spain took two months, and so bad were her sea-keeping qualities - even in the calm waters of the Mediterranean - that the crew of seasoned Scots were almost perpetually sea-sick throughout the voyage.
The Livadia was never used by the Tsar and his Empress - he was assassinated only a few days after the ship's arrival in Sevastopol.
Sources
Warships of the Imperial Russian Navy, Volume 1 Battleships: V.M. Tomitch, 1968
Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860 - 1905: N.J.M. Campbell, 1979
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