Dimensions

~164 cm long

25 cm wide 

6 cm high hull, 24 cm high to top of smokestacks, 71 cm high to top of the 'mask' or whatever that is.

Status

Mostly complete. Still need to finish attaching the gun barrels to the turrets. (Need more 'special' bricks to finish that.) Some of the torpedo net rods remain unattached on one side. Some inconsistant colouring where I ran out of red too. But 99.9% complete.

Model History

After building the CSS Virginia and USS Monitor I decided I wanted to build another naval vessel. I quickly setteled on the 1905 HMS Dreadnought. The Dreadnought was a dark grey colour (with a wooden deck), but unfortunately I don't have much dark grey Lego. I did, however, have a whole lot of unused red. So I made the Dreadnought red instead of grey. The top of the decks are yellow (best I could come up with for 'wood').

Object History

 At the beginning of the 20th century Britian was in a naval arms race with the recently unified Germany. At the time most big battleships were armed with an array of different sized guns. The concept of the all-big-gun ship was proposed early in the century. The idea, which was confirmed by observations of naval battles in the Russo-Japanese War in 1904-05, was that only the big guns a ship carried mattered because the enemy would never be within range of the smaller ones. Also, by carrying guns only of a single callibare gunners could more accurately aim the guns by observing the spashes the shells made near the targets. If there were more than one callibare splashes could not guide aiming because it would be impossible to tell which sized guns impacted where.

Although both Japan and America were planning to build all-big-gun battleships and the Italians had looked at the idea, it was the British that built the first, The HMS Dreadnought. The Dreadnought, completed in 1906, was armed with ten 12-inch guns, although its design meant it could train a maximum of 8 guns on any one target. Still this was three times the amount of firepower of the most powerful battleship afloat at the time. The Dreadnought essentially rendered all other large warships obsolete. It was also equiped with new turbine driven engines, which made it notiable faster than its predecessors.

Dispite its advances and high profile the Dreadnought itself was considered largely obsolete by the time World War I broke out in 1914. It was used mostly to guard ports and shorelines and did not take part in the Battle of Jutland. The only action it was was in March of 1915 when it rammed and sunk a German submarine. After the war the ship was placed in reserve and finally in 1923 was sold for scrape.

Source: Wikipedia