Unlucky ship...

The battle of Lissa in 1866, which saw Rear Admiral Tegethoff's Austrian fleet defeat a numerically superior Italian force, had an affect on ship design for the latter half of the 19th Century. (Possibly because Austria was such a naval underdog.)

What was unusual about the battle is that Tegethoff formed his main squadron into a rough wedge and charged the Italian battle line, seeking ramming attacks and close engagement. This was outside the rather staid "line of battle" tactics that had been most common for the last couple hundred years.

For this reason, late pre-dreadnought ironclads tended to all feature rams and have an emphasis on main armament that could fire directly forward. Everyone wants to copy a winner. And while Tegethoff was shooting from the hip in an attempt to neutralize his opponent's advantages, taking ships outside their designed envelope, now ships would be built from the ground up with situations like Lissa in mind.

In a race to keep up with the local squadrons of European colonial powers, China ordered some state of the art ironclads from Germany. They were scheduled to be delivered in 1884, but France was in the middle of a war with China and asked if the Germans would please hold off on delivering the ironclads until France had finished beating China. The Germans obliged and it was another year before the ships were delivered.

When they arrived, the Dingyuan and her sister ship, Zhenyuan, seriously altered the balance of power in the China Seas.

Following the fashion of the time, they had ram prows and a pair of staggered wing turrets, each with a brace of 12" Krupp breech-loaders. These turrets were arranged so that all four guns could fire fore or aft, as well as having a limited arc to each side where a four-gun broadside was possible.

I'd say that the effects of firing a 12" naval gun right across your own decks is best left to the imagination, but we don't have to use our imaginations. During the First Sino-Japanese War, at the Battle of the Yalu, Admiral Ding Ruchang was using the Dingyuan as his flagship. Worried about the superior gunnery prowess of the Chrysanthemum Fleet, he tried to pull a Tegethoff, ordering his ship to close with the Japanese and open fire at a closer range.

The ship's captain, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with closing with the Japanese line and ordered the crew to open fire at extreme range. This happened while the Admiral's staff and some Royal Navy advisors were still on the flying bridge, and one of the advisors recollected being catapulted by the blast in his memoirs. (It didn't actually destroy the flying bridge, that happened later by Japanese shellfire.)

When I found a book focusing on the battle, I had to order it. It's such an interesting period in naval history.
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