HMS Inflexible (1876)

HMS Inflexible with the pole masts fitted in 1885,[1] replacing the original full sailing rig
Class overview
Preceded by	HMS Dreadnought (1875)[2]
Succeeded by	Ajax class
History
United Kingdom
Builder	Portsmouth Dockyard
Cost	£812,000
Laid down	24 February 1874
Launched	27 April 1876
Commissioned	5 July 1881
Fate	Scrapped 1903
General characteristics
Displacement	10,880 tons 11,880 tons full load
Length	320 ft (98 m) pp 344 ft (105 m) oa
Beam	75 ft (23 m)
Draught	26.3 ft (8.0 m)
Propulsion	12 coal-fired boilers, two single-expansion Elder and Co. steam engines, 2 twin-bladed 20 ft (6.1 m) diameter screws
Speed	14.73 knots (27 km/h) @ 6,500 hp (4.8 MW)
Range	"Cross-Atlantic at economical speed"
Complement	440–470
Armament	4 × 16-inch (406.4 mm) 80-ton muzzle-loading rifles, 2 per turret 6 × 20-pounder breech loaders, replaced in 1885 with BL 4-inch (100 mm) guns, and replaced in 1897 with QF 4.7-inch (120-mm) guns 17 × machine guns 4 × 14-in (360 mm) torpedo tubes (two submerged bow tubes, two on carriages)
Armour	24-in (610 mm) waterline belt + 17-in (432 mm) teak 3-in (76 mm) deck 20-in (508 mm) citadel (reducing to 16 inches) + 21-in (533 mm) teak 17-in (432 mm) front, 16-inch back, turrets 22-in bulkheads, reducing to 14 inches (360 mm)

HMS Inflexible was a Victorian ironclad battleship carrying her main armament in centrally placed turrets. The ship was constructed in the 1870s for the Royal Navy to oppose the perceived growing threat from the Italian Regia Marina in the Mediterranean.

The Italian Navy had started constructing a pair of battleships, Duilio and Enrico Dandolo, equipped with four Armstrong 17.7-inch (450 mm) guns weighing 100 tons each. These were superior to the armament of any ship in the British Mediterranean Squadron, and Inflexible was designed as a counter to them.

Inflexible mounted larger guns than those of any previous British warship and had the thickest armour ever to be fitted to a Royal Navy ship. Controversially, she was designed so that if her un-armoured ends should be seriously damaged in action and become water-logged, the buoyancy of the armoured centre section of the ship would keep her afloat and upright.

The ship was the first major warship to depend in part for the protection of her buoyancy on a horizontal armoured deck below the water-line rather than armoured sides along the waterline.