page_title: King George V-class battleship (1911)
section_title: Design and description
hierarchical_section_title: King George V-class battleship (1911) / Design and description
caption_attribution_description: Right elevations and plans for the Orion- and King George V-class battleships
context_page_description: The King George V-class battleships were a group of four dreadnought battleships built for the Royal Navy in the early 1910s that were sometimes termed super-dreadnoughts. The sister ships spent most of their careers assigned to the 2nd Battle Squadron of the Home and Grand Fleets, sometimes serving as flagships. In October 1914, Audacious struck a mine and sank. Aside from participating in the failed attempt to intercept the German ships that had bombarded Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby in late 1914, the Battle of Jutland in May 1916 and the inconclusive Action of 19 August, the surviving ships' service during the First World War generally consisted of routine patrols and training in the North Sea.
  The three surviving ships were briefly reduced to reserve in 1919 before being transferred to the Mediterranean Fleet in 1920–1921 where they played minor roles in the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War and the Chanak Crisis of 1922. The first ship to return to Britain, King George V, became a training ship in 1923 but the other two were placed into reserve again upon their return the following year.
context_section_description: Ordered as part of the 1910–1911 Naval Programme, the King George V class was an enlarged version of the preceding Orion class with additional armour, a revised layout of the secondary armament and improved fire-control arrangements. The ships had an overall length of 597 feet 9 inches (182.2 m), a beam of 90 feet 1 inch (27.5 m) and a draught of 28 feet 8 inches (8.7 m). They displaced 25,420 long tons (25,830 t) at normal load and 27,120 long tons (27,560 t) at deep load. Their crew numbered around 869 officers and ratings upon completion and 1,114 in 1916.
  Sea trials with the battlecruiser Lion showed that the placement of the fore funnel between the forward superstructure and the foremast meant that hot clinkers and flue gases from the boilers made the spotting top on the foremast completely unworkable when the forward boilers were alight and that the upper bridge could easily be rendered uninhabitable, depending on the wind. The King George V class also used the same arrangement and they were altered while under construction to remedy the problem at a cost of approximately £20,000 per ship. The fore funnel was moved aft and a makeshift foremast was built from one of the struts of the original tripod mast. The spotting tower at the rear of the conning tower was removed, the conning tower enlarged, and the coincidence rangefinder was moved from the foremast spotting top to the roof of the conning tower.
  The ships of the King George V class were powered by two sets of Parsons direct-drive steam turbines. The outer propeller shafts were coupled to the high-pressure turbines in the outer engine rooms and these exhausted into low-pressure turbines in the centre engine room which drove the inner shafts. The turbines used steam provided by 18 water-tube boilers. They were rated at 27,000 shaft horsepower (20,000 kW) and were intended to give the battleships a maximum speed of 21 knots (39 km/h; 24 mph). During their sea trials, the ships exceeded their designed speed and horsepower, reaching a maximum of 22.9 knots (42.4 km/h; 26.4 mph). They carried a maximum of 3,100 long tons (3,150 t) of coal and an additional 840 long tons (853 t) of fuel oil that was sprayed on the coal to increase its burn rate. This gave them a range of 5,910–6,310 nautical miles (10,950–11,690 km; 6,800–7,260 mi) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph).
caption: Right elevations and plans for the Orion- and King George V-class battleships from Brassey's Naval Annual 1915, before the mast was moved forward of the funnel in the latter ships.
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