Dreadnought

On February 10, 1906, HMS Dreadnought was launched at Portsmouth and immediately rendered every battleship afloat obsolete. The reason was simple: she carried ten twelve-inch guns in five turrets — all of the same heavy caliber — and a steam turbine that drove her at twenty-one knots, faster than any predecessor. Before Dreadnought, battleships mixed heavy, medium, and light guns; fire control was impossible at long range because crews could not distinguish their own splashes from those of other calibers. Dreadnought's all-big-gun design solved that problem and in doing so restarted the entire naval arms race. Britain and Germany spent the next decade building fleets of ever-larger, ever-better-armored dreadnoughts that met at Jutland in 1916. In the game the dreadnought is the revolutionary capital ship of the Industrialization era, delivering unmatched broadside firepower that dominates all previous warship types, but expensive and slow.