page_title: Gun turret
section_title: Later designs
hierarchical_section_title: Gun turret / Warships / History / Later designs
caption_attribution_description: Diagrams depicting right elevation and deck plan of British Devastation class battleship.
context_page_description: A gun turret is a platform from which weapons can be fired that affords protection, visibility and some cone of fire. A modern gun turret is generally a rotatable weapon mount that houses the crew or mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon and at the same time lets the weapon be aimed and fired in some degree of azimuth and elevation.
context_section_description: HMS Thunderer (1872) represented the culmination of this pioneering work. An ironclad turret ship designed by Edward James Reed, she was equipped with revolving turrets that used pioneering hydraulic turret machinery to maneouvre the guns. She was also the world's first mastless battleship, built with a central superstructure layout, and became the prototype for all subsequent warships. With her sister HMS Devastation of 1871 she was another pivotal design, and led directly to the modern battleship.
  The US Navy tried to save weight and allow the much faster firing 8-inch to shoot during the long reload time necessary for 12-inch guns by superposing secondary gun turrets directly on top of the primary turrets (as in the Kearsarge and Virginia-class battleships), but the idea proved to be practically unworkable and was soon abandoned.
  With the advent of the South Carolina-class battleships in 1908, the main battery turrets were designed so as to superfire, to improve fire arcs on centerline mounted weapons. This was necessitated by a need to move all main battery turrets to the vessel's centerline for improved structural support. The 1906 HMS Dreadnought, while revolutionary in many other ways, had retained wing turrets due to concerns about muzzle blast affecting the sighting mechanisms of a turret below. A similar advancement was in the Kongō-class battlecruisers and Queen Elizabeth-class battleships, which dispensed with the "Q" turret amidships in favour of heavier guns in fewer mountings.
  Like pre-dreadnoughts, the first dreadnoughts had two guns in each turret; however, later ships began to be fitted with triple turrets. The first ship to be built with triple turrets was the Italian Dante Alighieri, although the first to be actually commissioned was the Austro-Hungarian SMS Viribus Unitis of the Tegetthoff class. By the beginning of World War II, most battleships used triple or, occasionally, quadruple turrets, which reduced the total number of mountings and improved armour protection. However, quadruple turrets proved to be extremely complex to arrange, making them unwieldy in practice.
  The largest warship turrets were in World War II battleships where a heavily armoured enclosure protected the large gun crew during battle. The calibre of the main armament on large battleships was typically 300 to 460 mm (12 to 18 in). The turrets carrying three 460 mm guns of Yamato each weighed around 2,500 tonnes. The secondary armament of battleships (or the primary armament of light cruisers) was typically between 127 and 152 mm (5.0 and 6.0 in). Smaller ships typically mounted guns from 76 mm (3.0 in) upwards, although these rarely required a turret mounting, except for large destroyers, like the American Fletcher and the German Narvik classes.
caption: HMS Thunderer, right elevation and plan from Brassey's Naval Annual, 1888
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