Their design was highly unusual in having the main guns on three barbettes grouped in a triangle around a central armored redoubt, two side-by-side forward and one on the centerline aft.

This was intended to maximize their firepower forward, both when operating in the narrow waters of the Bosphorus and when ramming.

Construction was slow because they were the largest warships built until then in the Black Sea, and the shipyards had to be upgraded to handle them.

[a] Ekaterina II's crew was considered unreliable, and she was disabled to prevent her from joining the mutiny.

There they spent most of the war and were captured by the Germans in 1918, who eventually turned them over to the British, who sabotaged their engines when they abandoned the Crimea in 1919.

This put a premium on forward-facing guns because ships might not be able to turn to bring their broadsides to bear on the enemy.

The Russians had been impressed by the performance of the barbette-mounted disappearing guns of HMS Temeraire during the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 and began to seriously consider the use of this type of installation in their new battleships.

[1] Construction had already begun when the armor scheme was revised after a visit to France by two naval constructors.

Upon their return they argued for a complete waterline armor belt to preserve the ship's buoyancy and speed if it was hit fore and aft.

[4] Ekaterina II and Chesma had two three-cylinder vertical compound steam engines, powered by fourteen cylindrical boilers.

All of the engines were imported from either France or the United Kingdom, except for those of the Ekaterina II which were built by the Baltic Works.

They carried 900 long tons (914 t) of coal at full load that provided a range of 2,800 nautical miles (5,186 km; 3,222 mi) at a speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph) and 1,367 nautical miles (2,532 km; 1,573 mi) at a speed of 14.5 knots (26.9 km/h; 16.7 mph).

[5] The main armament of the Ekaterina II-class ships consisted of three pairs of 12-inch (305 mm) guns mounted in twin-gun barbettes.

By the time that Sinop and Georgii Pobedonosets were finished the gun mount had been reduced in size enough that the sponsons could be eliminated.

[6] This problem had been anticipated and water tanks had been added to counteract the list, but they proved to be virtually useless because they took up to two hours to fill.

[7] The 30 calibers long Pattern 1877 gun fired a 731.3-pound (331.7 kg) shell at a muzzle velocity of 1,870 ft/s (570 m/s) to a range of 5,570 yards (5,090 m) at an elevation of 6°.

[12] They fired a 3.3-pound (1.5 kg) shell at a muzzle velocity of 1,476 ft/s (450 m/s) at a rate of 30 rounds per minute to a range of 2,020 yards (1,850 m).

They fired a 1.1-pound (0.50 kg) shell at a muzzle velocity of 1,450 ft/s (440 m/s) at a rate of 32 rounds per minute to a range of 3,038 yards (2,778 m).

[15] The Ekaterina II-class ships were originally designed with a short, heavily armored, central citadel, but this was changed during construction to a full waterline belt.

The three older ships used compound armor imported from Charles Cammell of the United Kingdom.

The belt was 8 feet (2.4 m) high, and tapered down to a thickness of six inches at the bottom edge for the 16-inch plates.

Some delays were caused by the necessity to send some equipment from St. Petersburg, but the primary reason for the lengthy six-year construction time were near-constant design changes after building had begun.

The gun mountings were found to be larger than anticipated and the redoubt had to be carried out over the ship's sides on sponsons to make enough room.

The redoubt also had to be moved back about 10 feet (3 m) to prevent the ships from trimming by the head and the armor was rearranged as mentioned earlier.

Several different proposals were made during this period or later to reconstruct the ships and make them effective combatants again.

None of these proposals were ever carried although the armor and new turrets were actually ordered for Chesma, but the Navy reconsidered the cost-effectiveness of the modernization and diverted both to the battleship Ioann Zlatoust then building.

[23] Both the Bolsheviks and the Whites captured her during the Russian Civil War after her engines were destroyed by the British in 1919.

However, loyal crew members regained control of the ship the next day and they ran her aground when Potemkin threatened to fire on her if she left Odessa harbor.