Wednesday's weird warship, Imperial Russian Navy's Vitse Admiral Popov
Popov class coastal defense ship
Displacement. 3550 t.
Lenght. 120'
Beam. 120'
Draft. 13'6"
Speed. 6 k.
Complement 203
Armament. 2 12", 8 88mm, 2 1pdr MG.
In the 1860's a number of naval authorities porposed maximising the beam of warships to shorten the hull and reduce the area protected by armor. Russian Admiral A. A. Popov took the idea to the extreme and designed a warship with a flat bottomed circular hull. In 1870 he built a small 24ft circular steamer to test his ideas and persuaded the Imperal Russian Navy to accept his idea for a fleet of 10 circular ironclads. Fortunatly, only two were built, The Novgorod and the Viste Admiral Popov.
The Viste Admiral Popov was laid down in 1874 as the Kiev at the Nikolaev Naval Shipyard near Odessa, and later renamed in honor of her designer. She was launched in 1875 and completed completed in 1877.
The ship was a dismal failure. She was too slow to steam against the current of the Dniepr, and proved very difficult to steer. The firing of just one gun caused her to spin out of control. Even counter-rotating some of the six propellers was unable to keep the ship on the correct heading. Nor could she cope with the rough weather of the Black Sea. She was prone to rapid rolling and pitching in anything more than a flat calm, and could not aim or fire her guns in such circumstances.
The Viste Admiral Popov served as a costal defense ship until the begining of the 20th century, when she was laid up at Sevastopol as a stores ship. She was scrapped just before the outbreak of WWI in 1914.