Talk:Chinese ironclad Zhenyuan

Hull
I doubt, if the hull was laid down in March 1882, as she was launched on 28 November 1882. I've found a year of costruction beggining 1880. Pibwl &#91;&#91;User_talk:Pibwl&#124;talk]] 14:33, 23 March 2006 (UTC)

Dates and stats
I'm not sure about the dates because 1: The construction took only 7 months??? It's a battleship! 2: The Chinese version gives completely different dates and measures Atchom 13:29, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

En Echelon Turrets
I'm not going to start rewriting text, because I don't tend to have very dry prose. However, I believe that one of the major points of naval architecture for this ship and her sister was turrets (or barbettes, as the article notes) mounted en echelon; I believe some mention should be made of that point - preferably by someone who can communicate it better than me. Further, and I'm not going to repeat this suggestion on the sister's article talk page, but if I recall correctly from Conway's 1860-1905, the turrets on each ship were mounted en echelon opposite of the other (one had the fore turret mounted to starboard and the after turret mounted to port, where the sister ship had the fore turret mounted to port and the after to starboard). Angelsy1 (talk) 18:07, 11 April 2011 (UTC)

Classification
No other ironclad turret ship on Wikipedia has the classification as a 'turret ship', even ones built in Germany like the Zhenyuan and Dingyuan were. I think the two ships article's be moved to 'Chinese ironclad Zhenyuan' and 'Chinese ironclad Dingyuan'. Semi-Lobster (talk) 00:49, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Is Zhenyuan really renamed after being captured by IJN?
I looked at Japanese source and the name in Kanji is the same as in Chinese - 鎮遠. So is the ship really renamed when it's in IJN? shows the name to be Chin Yen in IJN and formerly Chen Yuen in Beiyang Fleet. The latter name is not correct if it is Romanized by Wade-Gales, which should give "Chen Yuan" ("遠" is pronounced the same as "元" as in Yuan dynasty). I'm not sure if the change in spelling is the result of Romanization of Japanese, or the same Hanzi are pronounced differently in Japanese. Someone fluent in Japanese can help here. --Happyseeu (talk) 22:15, 16 May 2020 (UTC)

Add year to SFNs.
I feel year should be added to all templates. Then ref would be unneccessary in the cites. User-duck (talk) 17:51, 17 May 2021 (UTC)


 * There's no point in adding the information; the refs are fine as is. Parsecboy (talk) 18:41, 17 May 2021 (UTC)

Barbettes or turrets?
@@Parsecboy did these two Chinese ironclads have their main guns in barbettes or turrets? This page claims turrets but the page for the class says it was barbettes. My source (Padfield, Battleship) also claims that their main armament was "en barbette instead of in turrets". Which was it? Merrybrit (talk) 21:19, 6 November 2022 (UTC)


 * Conway's calls them "armored turret ships"; Feng obviously does as well (given the title he chose). The discrepancy probably has to do with the evolving definition of the "turret" at that time. Before the 1890s, "turret" usually meant a heavy Ericsson or Coles-type turret that spun on a central spindle but over the 1880s, navies began to move away from the heavy turrets to guns mounted in open barbettes, and then started adding enclosed gun shields to the rotating platforms. What we think of today as a gun turret would have been called an enclosed barbette mount in the 1870s. Parsecboy (talk) 22:55, 6 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The text of this article states that "As the Chinese made preparations in August for action, they removed the gun shields from the main battery turrets". It's hard to imagine removing a "gun shield" from a proper turret. It appears that the ships had a rotating gun platform with an attached gun shield on top of a barbette, not a solid turret the way we usually think of it.
 * It's also not clear that the Germans (who built the ships) had used any gun turrets ever before. The Sachsen-class which directly preceded these ships used barbettes and it's doubtful that the German shipbuilder would introduce a rotating gun turret without testing it first. Merrybrit (talk) 02:01, 7 November 2022 (UTC)
 * Oh, but they can be (after Jutland, SMS Seydlitz had to have the roof of her forward turret removed, along with the guns as part of the effort to lighten her enough to get into harbor - the same happened with SMS Rheinland after she was grounded in 1918; significant amounts of the turret armor had to be removed to get her into port). Modern turrets (or, more accurately, what we think of as turrets, as opposed to unarmored pivot mountings used on warships today) are exactly rotating gun platforms with attached gun shields.
 * German gun turrets go back to SMS Arminius, built in the 1860s (in the UK) and the Preussen-class ironclads built in the 1870s (in Germany), though both were the old Coles-style turrets (Arminius was designed by Coles himself, in fact). Parsecboy (talk) 13:06, 7 November 2022 (UTC)