|
An encyclopedia project—and more!
Welcome to Citizendium, a wiki-based endeavor to provide free knowledge with the highest standards of writing, reliability, and informativeness. We welcome anyone who wants to share their knowledge by writing well-researched and authoritative articles on virtually any subject, and by improving articles written by others. Please read through our easy registration procedures, then join us as an Author and perhaps also as a recognised expert Editor.
- We have 16,457 articles at different stages of development, of which 165 are expert-approved.
- Our community is collegial and congenial; everyone writes under his or her verified real name. Even this, our home page, can be edited by any Citizen.
- We welcome anyone who has knowledge, broad or narrow, about any subject. Sign up—we need Authors, and from amongst them, specialist Editors.
- We prefer new material but allow work from other sites to be imported and improved under certain conditions.
- For a brief guide on what Citizendium is and is not, see Myths and Facts; for more details, see the frequently-asked questions page.
- Students in higher education write here as part of their courses under our Eduzendium initiative.
- We have a Charter to provide a framework for governance.
- For more details on participation, see Why Citizendium? and Why I Contribute.
- To learn more about the project, see our article on ourselves, our Help System, our financial report and our Statistics page.
- Follow us on Friendfeed, Twitter (general news; new pages), Facebook or Google+.
Join us
| Our help system
|
| Questions and answers to help you find the information you need
|
From the HOME page you can get started, get technical help, see our policies, and explore our organization in detail.
|
Some of our finest
Approved Articles (165)
Developed Articles (1,102)
(16,457 total articles)
|
Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.
—John Steinbeck
—add a quote about knowledge or writing
•Did You Know?
•Citizendium Blog - Latest entry: 01-Jan-2013
|
Monthly Donation Day | Monthly Donor Honor Roll
CZ:Monthly Honor Roll of Users Editing the Wiki
Featured Article about
The battleship, though now essentially obsolete as a naval weapon, is a naval vessel intended to engage the most powerful warships of an opposing navy. Evolved from the ship of the line, their main armament consisted of multiple heavy cannon mounted in movable turrets. The ships boasted extensive armor and as such were designed to survive severe punishment inflicted upon them by other capital ships.
The word "battleship" was coined around 1794 and is a contraction of the phrase "line-of-battle ship," the dominant wooden warship during the Age of Sail.[1] The term came into formal use in the late 1880s to describe a specific type of ironclad warship (now referred to by historians as pre-Dreadnought battleships).[2] In 1906, the commissioning of HMS Dreadnought heralded a revolution in capital ship design. Subsequent battleship designs were therefore referred to as "dreadnoughts." A general criterion from thereon in was that the armor of a true battleship must be sufficiently thick to withstand a hit by its own most powerful gun, within certain constraints. Battlecruisers, while having near-battleship-sized guns, did not meet this standard of protection, and instead were intended to be fast enough to outrun the more heavily armed and armored battleship.[3]
From 1905 to the early 1940s, battleships defined the strength of a first-class navy. The idea of a strong "fleet in being", backed by a major industrial infrastructure, was key to the thinking of the naval strategist per Alfred Thayer Mahan, writing in his 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1763 (1890). The essence of Mahan from a naval viewpoint is that a great navy is a mark and prerequisite of national greatness. In a 1912 letter to the New York Times, he counseled against relying on international relations for peace, and pointed out that other major nations were all building battleships.[4]
Asymmetrical threats to battleships began, in the early 20th century, with torpedoes from fast attack craft and mines. These underwater threats could strike in more vulnerable spots than could heavy guns. Aircraft, however, became an even more decisive threat by World War II.
.... (read more)
|
|
