page_title: Barbette
section_title: Use in warships
hierarchical_section_title: Barbette / Use in warships
caption_attribution_description: English: Photograph of the hull of the USS Maryland (BB-46) laid down in the shipyard during construction in 1917
context_page_description: Barbettes are several types of gun emplacement in terrestrial fortifications or on naval ships.
  In recent naval usage, a barbette is a protective circular armour support for a heavy gun turret. This evolved from earlier forms of gun protection that eventually led to the pre-dreadnought. The name barbette ultimately comes from fortification - it originally meant a raised platform or mound, as in the French phrase en barbette, which refers to the practice of firing a cannon over a parapet rather than through an embrasure in a fortification's casemate. The former gives better angles of fire but less protection than the latter. The disappearing gun was a variation on the barbette gun; it consisted of a heavy gun on a carriage that would retract behind a parapet or into a gunpit for reloading. Barbettes were primarily used in coastal defences, but saw some use in a handful of warships, and some inland fortifications. The term is also used for certain aircraft gun mounts.
  Shipboard barbettes were primarily used in armoured warships - starting in the 1860s during a period of intense experimentation with other mounting systems for heavy guns at sea.
context_section_description: Following the introduction of ironclad warships in the early 1860s, naval designers grappled with the problem of mounting heavy guns in the most efficient way possible. The first generation of ironclads employed the same broadside arrangement as the old ship of the line, but it was not particularly effective for ahead or stern fire. This was particularly important to designers, since the tactic of ramming was revived following its successful employment at the decisive Austrian victory at the Battle of Lissa in 1866. Ramming required a ship to steam directly at its opponent, which greatly increased the importance of end-on fire. Designers such as Cowper Phipps Coles and John Ericsson designed the first gun turrets in the 1860s, which gave the guns a wide field of fire. These turrets were exceedingly heavy, which required them to be placed low in the ship to reduce top-weight—and produced a dangerous tendency to capsize in heavy seas, amply demonstrated by the loss of HMS Captain and Coles himself with the ship in a gale in 1870.
  In the 1870s, designers began to experiment with an en barbette type of mounting. The barbette was a fixed armoured enclosure protecting the gun. The barbette could take the form of a circular or elongated ring of armour around the rotating gun mount over which the guns (possibly fitted with a gun shield) fired. The barbette system reduced weight considerably, since the machinery for the rotating gun mount, along with the mount itself, was much lighter than that required for the gun house of a turret. The savings in weight could then be passed on to increase armour protection for the hull, improve coal storage capacity, or to install larger, more powerful engines. In addition, because barbettes were lighter, they could be placed higher in the ship without jeopardizing stability, which improved their ability to be worked in heavy seas that would have otherwise rendered turrets unusable. This also permitted a higher freeboard, which also improved seakeeping.
  Ironclads equipped with barbettes were referred to as "barbette ships" much like their contemporaries, turret ships and central battery ships, which mounted their heavy guns in turrets or in a central armored battery. Many navies experimented with all three types in the 1870s and 1880s, including the British Admiral-class battleships, the French Marceau-class ironclads, the Italian Italia-class battleships, and the German Sachsen-class ironclads, all of which employed barbettes to mount their heavy guns. All of these navies also built turret and or central battery ships during the same period, though none had a decisive advantage over the other. The British and the Russian navies experimented with using disappearing guns afloat, including on the British HMS Temeraire, the Russian monitor Vitse-admiral Popov, and some of the Ekaterina II-class battleships. They were not deemed particularly successful and were not repeated.
  In the late 1880s, the debate between barbette or turret mounts was finally settled. The Royal Sovereign class, mounted their guns in barbettes, but the follow-on design, the Majestic class, adopted a new mounting that combined the benefits of both kinds of mounts. A heavily armoured, rotating gun house was added to the revolving platform, which kept the guns and their crews protected. The gun house was  smaller and lighter than the old-style turrets, which still permitted placement higher in the ship and the corresponding benefits to stability and seakeeping. This innovation gradually became known simply as a turret, though the armored tube that held the turret substructure, which included the shell and propellant handling rooms and the ammunition hoists, was still referred to as a barbette. These ships were the prototype of the so-called pre-dreadnought battleships, which proved to be broadly influential in all major navies over the next fifteen years.
  Ships equipped with barbette mountings did not see a great deal of combat, owing to the long period of relative peace between their appearance in the 1870s and their obsolescen
caption: USS Maryland under construction in 1917, showing the forward two barbettes without the gun turrets installed
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