How They Built The World's Largest Warship (HMS Hood)

HMS Hood carried 13,800 tons of armour, more than any warship Britain had ever built. Four Brown-Curtis geared steam turbines producing 144,000 horsepower drove her through the water at 31 knots. Eight 15-inch guns could hit a target 17 miles away. She was the largest warship in the world for twenty years. On 24 May 1941, a single shell found a gap in that armour and she sank in three minutes. 1,415 men died. Three survived. The gap was not a surprise. After the Battle of Jutland in 1916, where three British battlecruisers exploded and sank, the Admiralty added 5,000 tons of extra armour to Hood's design mid-construction at John Brown's shipyard in Clydebank. But instead of redesigning the protection scheme from scratch, they thickened the existing layout. The deck armour remained a compromise. Live-firing trials during construction proved shells could still reach her magazines. A full modernisation was scheduled for 1941 to fix it. The war came first. This is the machine story of the ship Britain built to survive the next war, and the engineering compromise that destroyed her. #HMSHood #Clydebank #JohnBrownShipyard #BritishWarship #RoyalNavy #BattleOfJutland #DenmarkStrait #NavalEngineering #BattleCruiser #MarineEngineering #EngineeringHistory #Bismarck #WorldWarTwo #SteamTurbines #BritishHistory