The Florida-class battleships of the United States Navy comprised two ships: Florida and Utah.

Launched in 1910 and 1909 respectively and commissioned in 1911, they were slightly larger than the preceding Delaware class design but were otherwise very similar.

In the previous Delaware-class, North Dakota received steam turbine propulsion as an experiment while Delaware retained triple-expansion engines.

Both ships were involved in the 1914 Second Battle of Vera Cruz, deploying their Marine contingents as part of the operation.

Florida was assigned to the British Grand Fleet and based in Scapa Flow; in December 1918 she escorted President Woodrow Wilson to France for the peace negotiations.

Florida was scrapped, Utah converted into first a radio-controlled target ship, then an anti-aircraft gunnery trainer.

Captain William Sims led a reform movement that assigned warship design to the General Board.

Their larger beam gave them greater metacentric height, in which the Delawares were notably deficient, which improved buoyancy and reduced hull stress.

[3] The ships mounted new 5-inch (127 mm)/51-caliber guns as secondary batteries in casemates that boasted increased armor protection.

[4] The class retained the large and fully enclosed conning towers that were adopted for the preceding Delawares, as a result of American studies of the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

[5] The wider beam increased the vessels' metacentric height, which allowed the Floridas to accommodate their larger medium-caliber guns without any real penalty in topweight.

[5] It was intended originally to arm these ships with eight 14-inch (356 mm)/45-caliber guns then in development in superfiring fore-and-aft mountings.

At 15 degrees elevation, the guns could hit targets out to approximately 20,000 yd (18,288 m)[13] Unfortunately, the turret layout of the Delawares was also retained, with its respective challenges.

[7] These guns fired a 50 lb (23 kg) armor-piercing (AP) shell at a muzzle velocity of 3,150 ft/s (960 m/s) and a rate of 8 to 9 rounds per minute.

These guns fired a 16.5 lb (7 kg) shell at a muzzle velocity of 1,650 ft/s (503 m/s) to a maximum range of 8,800 yd (8,047 m) and ceiling of 18,000 ft (5,486 m) at an elevation of 75 degrees and a rate of between eight and nine rounds per minute.

[19] Florida, ordered under hull number "Battleship #30", was laid down at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York on 9 March 1909.

Work proceeded faster on Utah than on her sister ship, and she was launched about four and a half months earlier, on 23 December 1909.

[20] The ship, part of the US Navy's Battleship Division Nine, under the command of Rear Admiral Hugh Rodman, arrived on 7 December and was assigned to the 6th Battle Squadron of the Grand Fleet.

Following training exercises with the British fleet, 6th Battle Squadron was tasked with convoy protection duty on the route to Scandinavia.

[21] Following the end of the war, in December 1918, the ship escorted President Woodrow Wilson on his trip to Europe to participate in the peace negotiations at Versailles.

Later in December, Florida returned to the United States to participate in the Victory Fleet Review in New York harbor.

[20] Post-war, Florida returned to the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet; she operated along the east coast of the United States and into Central America.

In December 1920, she carried the US Secretary of State, Bainbridge Colby, on a diplomatic trip around the Caribbean and South America.

In 1935 she was rebuilt again, gaining a single 1.1-inch (28 mm)/75-caliber anti-aircraft gun in a quadruple mount for experimental testing and development of the new type of weapon.

She continued her role as a target ship,[22] and in 1941 had several additional anti-aircraft guns installed to increase her capacity to train gunners.

A few years later, the hull was partially righted and towed closer to Ford Island in a failed salvage effort, where the wreck remains today.