Due to her heavy coal consumption, she returned to the United States before the other ships in October 1908. As one of the battleships of the Great White Fleet, Maine departed in December 1907. Her duty for the next five years was to serve in the Atlantic and off the eastern coast of the United States. This was the point at which the ships that had been laid down before were redesignated 'pre-dreadnoughts'.The lead ship of her pre-Dreadnought battleship class, USS Maine (Battleship #10), was commissioned on December 29, 1902, at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The existing battleships were decisively outclassed, and new and more powerful battleships were from then on known as dreadnoughts. Her innovative steam turbine engines also made her faster. Dreadnought followed the trend in battleship design to heavier, longer-ranged guns by adopting an "all-big-gun" armament scheme of ten 12-inch guns. These battleships were abruptly made obsolete by the arrival of HMS Dreadnought in 1906. HMS Ocean was typical of pre-dreadnought battleships The last decisive clash of pre-dreadnought fleets was between the Imperial Japanese Navy and the Imperial Russian Navy at the Battle of Tsushima on. Meanwhile, the battleship fleets of the United Kingdom, France, and Russia expanded to meet these new threats.
New naval powers such as Germany, Japan, the United States, and to a lesser extent Italy and Austria-Hungary, began to establish themselves with fleets of pre-dreadnoughts. The similarity in appearance of battleships in the 1890s was underlined by the increasing number of ships being built. These ships distinctively carried a main battery of very heavy guns upon the weather deck, in large rotating mounts either fully or partially armoured over, and supported by one or more secondary batteries of lighter weapons on broadside.
Built from steel, protected by compound, nickel steel or case-hardened steel armour, pre-dreadnought battleships were driven by coal-fired boilers powering compound reciprocating steam engines which turned underwater screws. In contrast to the multifarious development of ironclads in preceding decades, the 1890s saw navies worldwide start to build battleships to a common design as dozens of ships essentially followed the design of the Royal Navy's Majestic class. HMS Royal Sovereign was the first pre-dreadnought battleship of the Royal Navy.
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