HMS Nile (1888)

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Career
Laid down:	April 8, 1886
Launched:	March 27, 1888
Completed :	July 10, 1891
Broken up:	1912
Specification
Displacement:	12,590 tons
Length:	345 ft
Beam:	73 ft
Draught:	28 ft 6 inches
Engine:	Two-shaft Maudslay triple expansion I.H.P.= 7,500 normal draught, 12,102 forced draught
Speed:	15 knots normal draught, 16.8 knots forced draught
Complement:	577
Armament:	Four 13.5 inch breech-loaders Six 4.7 inch quick-firers Eight 6-pounders Nine 3-pounders Five torpedo tubes
Armour:	Belt 20 inches amidships, 14 inches at ends Forward bulkhead 16 inches After bulkhead 14 inches Citadel 18 inches to 16 inches Turrets 18 inches Conning tower 14 inches Battery bulkheads 5 inches Battery screen 4 inches Deck 3 inches

HMS Nile was a battleship of the Royal Navy of the Victorian era, a ship of the Trafalgar class and the only sister-ship of HMS Trafalgar.

She was the last British battleship to be completed with a single citadel; all subsequent capital ships had separate citadels fore and aft. Also, she was the first British battleship to mount a secondary armament of quick -firing guns, which are guns in which the charge and shell are combined together in a cartridge which is loaded as a single unit. She was originally designed to mount eight 5-inch breech-loaders as her secondary armament, but the marginally smaller 4.7 inch guns were substituted in January 1890 when their superiority over the breech-loaders became clear. The quick-firers were able to fire, on tests, ten rounds per gun in one minute and twenty seconds; a rate some four times faster than the breech-loaders they replaced. As it was accepted at the time that hits from any calibre gun of 4 inches or more could be expected to disable a torpedo-boat or a destroyer (formerly known as torpedo-boat destroyers) it was apparent that a rate of fire, and an assumed rate of hitting, four times greater, had to relate to a superior anti-torpedo armament.

[edit] Service History

She ran her trials in July 1890, in ballast as her guns and mountings had at that time not been delivered. After delivery, she was commissioned at Portsmouth on June 30, 1891 for manoevres, following which she joined the Mediterranean Fleet. In January 1898 she came home to become the port guardship at Devonport. In February 1903 she was relegated to the Reserve, where she remained until she was sold on July 9, 1912.