Warship
The main types of warships today are, in order of decreasing size: aircraft carriers – amphibious assault ships – cruisers – destroyers – frigates – corvettes – fast attack boats.
[2] A more extensive list follows: The first evidence of ships being used for warfare comes from Ancient Egypt, specifically the northern Nile River most likely to defend against Mediterranean peoples.
The development of catapults in the 4th century BC and the subsequent refinement of this technology enabled the first fleets of siege engine - equipped warships by the Hellenistic age.
Naval artillery was redeveloped in the 14th century, but cannon did not become common at sea until the guns were capable of being reloaded quickly enough to be reused in the same battle.
The size of a ship required to carry a large number of cannons made oar-based propulsion impossible, and warships came to rely primarily on sails.
By the middle of the 17th century, warships were carrying increasing numbers of cannons on their broadsides and tactics evolved to bring each ship's firepower to bear in a line of battle.
Another revolution in capital warship design began shortly after the start of the 20th century, when Britain launched the Royal Navy's all-big-gun battleship Dreadnought in 1906.
Powered by steam turbines, it was bigger, faster and more heavily gunned than any existing battleships, which it immediately rendered obsolete.
[5][6] Tests were conducted by the Royal Navy in 1904 involving the torpedo-boat destroyer Spiteful, the first warship powered solely by fuel oil.
Bismarck was heavily damaged and sunk/scuttled after a series of sea battles in the north Atlantic in 1941, while Tirpitz was destroyed by the Royal Air Force in 1944.
For the first time, the aircraft carrier became the clear choice to serve as the main capital ship within a naval task force.
Modern warships are generally divided into seven main categories, which are: aircraft carriers, cruisers,[a] destroyers, frigates, corvettes, submarines, and amphibious warfare ships.
Class designations no longer reliably indicate a displacement hierarchy, and the size of all vessel types has grown beyond the definitions used earlier in the 20th century.
By 1982 the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) treaty negotiations had produced a legal definition of what was then generally accepted as a late-twentieth century warship.
The UNCLOS definition was : "A warship means a ship belonging to the armed forces of a State bearing the external marks distinguishing such ships of its nationality, under the command of an officer duly commissioned by the government of the State and whose name appears in the appropriate service list or its equivalent, and manned by a crew which is under regular armed forces discipline.
During the Second World War Nazi Germany's fleet of U-boats (submarines) almost starved Britain into submission and inflicted huge losses on US coastal shipping.
First at Taranto and then at Pearl Harbor, the aircraft carrier demonstrated its ability to strike decisively at enemy ships out of sight and range of surface vessels.
