Whilst I Am Familiar With Battleships,

in a boys own sort of way,

also ironclads, I was intrigued to find out that some ironclads did not stick to the tradition of being long and narrow, some like the the Novgorod, a model of it pictured above, were made round, the ship weighed in at 2,490 tons and had a diameter of 101 feet, it carried 2 12-inch guns that retracted into an armoured turret, the guns sat on a turntable that could move 35 degrees in either direction, the ship had 6 engines, each of which powered 1 propeller,

now you may think OK they built one and that was it, but no, it appeared that the ship was thought to be successful, so Russia followed up on the design by building a larger version from 1874-1877, after testing the Novgorod’s seaworthiness, Popov decided that the second ship should be bigger, so the 3,550-ton Vice-Admiral Popov was built, pictured on the right above, it had a diameter of 120 feet, both ships did have a slight problem though, often floundered even in calm water and rivers, let alone the open sea, worse, when idling, Novogord and Popov tended to spin in circles,

the Czar, however, was fond of the design and ordered the construction of the Livadia, (above), a circular royal yacht, dimensions of the Livadia are pretty impressive at 235' x 153' x 6'2", it displaced 7,700 tons, with 10 coal-fired fire-tube boilers, each of the triple screws were 16 feet in diameter, designed to cruise at 14 knots, it had a crew of 260 and was built at at John Elder & Co.'s yard in Clydebank, Scotland during 8 months in 1880, I doubt we will ever see round battleships again but with today's stealth ships who knows?