This Has To Be The Worst Battleship Ever Built

The USS Massachusetts has got to one of the worst battleships ever made- that’s why it got to spend approximately 102 years rusting outside the mouth of Pensacola Bay. Today, the ship is an underwater archaeological preserve managed by the state of Florida.

History

The second battleship made for the US Navy, Massachusetts was so poorly designed that it was considered obsolete and retired from the fleet just five years after it launched. Launched to great fanfare in 1893, 15,000 people showed up to see the 350-foot-long ship slide from the dry docks into the water.

Immediate Flop

The ship was an immediate flop. Chief among the flaws of Massachusetts is that if you turned both the giant 13-inch gun turrets to shoot at the enemy on one side of the boat, the weight of the gun barrels caused the entire ship to list so severely to that side that much of the deck and many of the guns on board would go underwater.

Additionally, the four 13-inch guns together weighed 544,000 pounds. Some naval historians characterized the problem as attempting too much on boats that simply weren’t big enough to support the incredible number of guns they were outfitted with.

Design

The Massachusettes featured armored sides made of solid steel that was five inches thick at the water line. However, it turned out that the armor was placed too low, doing little to protect the vessel. Meanwhile, the hull below the water line was unarmored and vulnerable.The ship nearly sank three separate times after hitting submerged objects in Florida, New York, and Maine.

The design of the hull can be likened to the Civil War-era class of monitor-style boats 40 years earlier with their low decks. The ship had so little freeboard that it was constantly in danger being awash in the most moderate of seas.

However, perhaps the most critical design error was to forgo a bilge keel which would have helped stabilize the ship. The reason to do without the keel was that there wasn’t a dry dock in the United States that was big enough to build such a big ship with a keel and constructing a suitable dry dock would increase the price of the boats too much.

Wreck

The Massachusetts sank in 26 feet of water and was later used for target practice during WWII. Eventually, the state of Florida was granted ownership of the wreck, naming it its fourth underwater archaeological preserve in June 1993, marking the 100th anniversary of the ship’s launch.

The wreck was remarkably in good shape despite being underwater for 95 years. Over time, the hull was so encrusted by marine life that it reached a sort of stasis, no longer disintegrating.