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Conway's Battleships: The Definitive Visual Reference to the World's All-Big-Gun Ships | 
 enlarge | Creator: Ian Sturton
Publisher: Naval Institute Press
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $32.97
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Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 377213
Media: Hardcover
Edition: Rev Exp
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 192
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.4
Dimensions (in): 11.7 x 10.2 x 1.1
ISBN: 159114132X
Dewey Decimal Number: 359
EAN: 9781591141327
ASIN: 159114132X
Publication Date: October 15, 2008
Shipping: Eligible for Super Saver Shipping
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
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Product Description
For two generations, battleships represented the military might and pride of their respective countries. They threatened, they impressed, they surprised in a way that no other symbol could, and their presence influenced events for hundreds of miles around. Since today's capital ships are solely platforms for missiles or aircraft, battleships will never be built again. This volume preserves the technical data, design background, and career histories of all the world's battleships and battle cruisers. Organized by nation, type, and class, each battleship is described in detail and illustrated with plans and historic photographs.
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| Customer Reviews:
decent overview of Dreadnought and after battleships November 28, 2008
This book provides a very reasonable quick look at the battleships from Dreadnought and South Carolina on. The term "all-big-gun ships" may be a bit of a misnomer. You'll find the Glorious and Furious here, which were basically bizarre cruisers--not even battlecruisers, but you will not find the pocket battleship Graf Spee, with its 6 11" guns. Nor will you find monitors, which are certainly all-big-gun ships, but not battleships. The omission of the Graf Spee/Deutschland seems odd. You cannot limit inclusion just to all-big-gun warships of 12" guns and up, since you'd then have to leave out the Nassau, Von Der Tann, Seydlitz, etc, warships of WW I.
You get side views, photographs, and some paintings in the book, plus a short narrative history. This is done in 240 pages, so there is not much room to go into a wealth of details. The book is well-done, with glossy pages, and it has a good feel to it. There are, however, some basic problems which are not addressed here. The large warships (cruisers, battlecruisers, pocket battleships, and battleships--I'm not including carriers here) of later WWI and all of WW II all had (to my knowledge) center-line turrets. This made protection of those turrets easier, and it was more efficient in terms of fields of fire, at least as regards broadsides. There were ships in which some of the turrets could only fire broadside, not forward or back. For these ships, side diagrams are sufficient to give the reader an appreciation of the firepower capabilities. But in many WW I ships (as well as some WW II destroyers, etc) many of the turrets were not centerline. In the Nassau and Helgoland classes, for example, which had 6 2-gun turrets, only 4 of the turrets could fire, say, to port. The British had quite a few battleships like this, and others where, say, a turret was located on the port side of the hull, and further back another turret was on the starboard. In theory, the port turret could fire across the deck to starboard, but the blast effects would have been a major problem. The side views provided in the book are not as useful in these cases as an overhead diagram would have been. Fields of fire are certainly important in these cases.
There's no reference section for sources and other recommended books. If you're interested in the design of battleships, I'd strongly recommend the classic by Oscar Parkes: British Battleships. This book--copies are expensive, but well worth it--has a wealth of information, design details, narrative, overhead views, etc, on the British battleships from 1860 on, and there's plenty also about battleships of other navies, and the influence they had upon British design. If you like battleship details, that's a book you should have in your library. But for a quicker review, Conway's book is fine.
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