The Battleship

A battleship is a large, heavily armored warship with a main battery consisting of the largest caliber of guns. Battleships are larger, and better-armed and better-armored than cruisers and destroyers.

Battleship design continually evolved to incorporate and adapt technological advances to maintain an edge. The word battleship was coined around 1794 and is a shortened form of line-of-battle ship, the dominant warship in the Age of Sail. The term came into formal use in the late 1880s to describe a type of iron clad warship whose design culminated in the 1890s with the generation of ships now known as pre-dreadnought battleships. In 1906, HMS Dreadnaught heralded a revolution in battleship design, and for many years modern battleships were referred to as dreadnaughts. The key distinction being the focus on being a platform for strictly big guns.

USS Texas BB35

Battleships were the subject of a major arms race in the early 1900's and remained so until World War II when the aircraft carrier emerged as the primary vehicle to extend military power at sea.

For more information on Battleships go to Wikipedia.

I am currently featuring a nice selection of 127 Battleship Covers Battleship covers on eBay. A number of these majestic ships were placed in and out of service multiple times, coming back for the Korean and Vietnam wars, primarily as gunfire platforms.

Covers and post cards from these ships are not uncommon, after all they had crew comparable in size to many small towns. At the same time, because of the volume of mail and time in service there are many opportunities to collect different postmark types as well as events. Dread naught the battleship, it makes a fine collecting topic.

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