Russian monitor Vitse-admiral Popov
Vitse-admiral Popov was a monitor built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the 1870s. It was one of the most unusual warships ever constructed, and still survives in popular naval myth as one of the worst warships ever built. The hull was circular to reduce draught while allowing the ship to carry much more armour and a heavier armament than other ships of the same size. "Vitse-admiral Popov" played a minor role in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 and was reclassified as a coast-defence ironclad in 1892. The ship was decommissioned  in 1903 and sold for scrap in 1911. Background. In 1868, the Scottish shipbuilder John Elder published an article that advocated that widening the beam of a ship would reduce the area that needed to be protected and allow it to carry thicker armour and heavier, more powerful guns in comparison to a normal ship. In addition such a ship would have a shallower draught and that only a moderate increase in power would be required to match the speed of the normal ship. Sir Edward Reed, then Director of Naval Construction of the Royal Navy, agreed with Elder's  conclusions. Rear-Admiral Andrei Alexandrovich Popov of the Imperial Russian Navy further broadened Elder's concept by broadening the ship so that it was actually circular and he made the design flat-bottomed, unlike Elder's convex hull, to minimise its draught. Popov's design was intended to meet an 1869 requirement to defend the Dnieper-Bug Estuary and the Kerch Strait. The requirement was for very heavily armoured ships of draught and armed with rifled guns, four of which should cost no more than four million rubles. The met all of the requirements except that their armament was not  powerful enough, so General-Admiral Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich selected Popov's circular design in late December 1869. A model was built with a circular hull and performed well during tests in the Baltic Sea at St. Petersburg in April 1870; when Tsar Alexander II received reports of the trials, he nicknamed the ship a "popovka", after the designer. Popov's initial design proved to be too grandiose and had to be scaled down. On 24 October, the Tsar approved his design for a ship in diameter, armed with two 11-inch guns, and protected by of armour. It was  estimated to cost 1.94 million rubles per ship and the total cost of the programme, including improvements to the shipyards, would cost 8.5 million rubles. For further testing, the "Kambala" ("Flounder"), a circular ship in diameter, was built in 1871. Equipped with two engines of eight nominal horsepower each, her trials during that summer were considered a success. "Vitse-admiral Popov" was begun as the second ship of the class, after , but Popov took the opportunity, when construction of the ship was suspended shortly after it began, to massively enlarge the ship to accommodate larger, more powerful guns and heavier  armour. The Tsar approved the new design on 25 August 1873 although construction did not resume immediately. He also renamed the ship from "Kiev" to "Vitse-admiral Popov", after her designer, on 21 October. Description. "Vitse-admiral Popov" was not perfectly circular like the earlier ship; she had an overall length of and a beam of . Her hull had a draught of , but her propellers stuck out well below the bottom of the hull to a depth of . The ship displaced nearly 50% more at full load than did "Novgorod" although her freeboard remained . Like the earlier ship the deck  curved upwards to the gun barbette in the center, but the barbette was entirely enclosed by a large unarmoured superstructure that included accommodations for an admiral and his staff. She had a crew of 19 officers and 187 ratings. Her bluff hull form meant that she lost speed in heavy weather and, in some conditions, the ship could pitch enough to place her propellers out of the water. The biggest drawback to her hull shape was that it greatly reduced the rudder's ability to turn the ship by masking much of the flow of water; so much so that  it took 40–45 minutes to make a full circle and the ship was almost unsteerable in a severe storm. The solution adopted was to use the engines for steering and leave the rudder fixed, even though this reduced the ship's speed. During a Force 7 storm, "Vitse-admiral Popov"s captain wrote that: "the vessel took on a lot of water through the hatches in front of the ventilators... The steering wheel was torn out of