I did not want to post this in the trivia thread to try to prevent a tangential thread forming. The Russian all big gun design I referred to was from 1884 and was in a paper written by Alekseyevich Stepanov who had supposedly become convinced by 1880 that the arcs of fire for an individual ship would not matter as future engagements would be carried out between fleets of battleships. He was investigating the most efficient lay out of the main armament for such an engagement. The ship he proposed had 8 12" guns laid out in 4 double mounts along the centerline of the vessel. Light armament was to be 50 47mm quick firing guns for defense against torpedo boats. Armor would be a 380mm on the central citadel with 75mm as a waterline belt. The broadside would be only 6 12" guns as the two mid ships turrets could only fire to one side. Speed was planned to be 16 knots on a displacement of 9720 tons. Length 104.5m, breadth 20.5m, depth 7.2m Source- Siegfried Breyer. Soviet Warship Development, Volume 1: 1917-1937. Conway Maritime Press, Ltd. 1992 page 17.
So it would be similar to the Invincible BCs, which could only fire their amidships turrets to one side? Still, very interesting design. Any idea what the rate of fire would be on those main guns? Battleship Fuji (1897) had to rotate her guns back to center to reload, taking roughly 4-5 minutes between shots. Battleship Mikasa (1900) did not have the same need, but still required roughly a minute and a half to reload and fire. Dreadnought was able to fire a maximum rate of roughly two shots per minute. My understanding is that the higher rate-of-fire of "intermediate" guns between the 12" primary and 6" secondary guns was the reason many nations made semi-dreadnoughts (like HMS King Edward VII, with 12" mains, 9.2" intermediate, 6" secondary, and 3" (12-pdr) tertiary guns).
It was never a design worked out in detail but I imagine these were the guns that were envisioned. http://www.navweaps.com/Weapons/WNRussian_12-30_m1877.htm The open barbette mountings were all on the center line but basically yes.
