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Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Courageous class battlecruiser/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted by SandyGeorgia 05:54, 13 August 2010 [1].

Courageous class battlecruiser

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Courageous class battlecruiser (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

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Nominator(s): Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 02:51, 1 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I am nominating this for featured article because it just passed a MilHist A-class review and I've tweaked it a little since then. These ships had a rather odd history that has been split into two articles, one for their service as battlecruisers and the other for their time as aircraft carriers. Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 02:51, 1 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]


Support after a very thorough A-class assessment at Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Assessment/Courageous class battlecruiser, per usual disclaimer. I would appreciate it if someone would check my copyediting. - Dank (push to talk) 02:58, 1 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

  • Looking at this as a reasonably educated reader completely ignorant of the topic area, a few points:
    • For the "Design and description" section, could you give a little context about what Admiral Fisher's Baltic Project entailed? Given that is the reason behind the design of the class, it seems important. Without reading any other articles, I pick up only that he wanted the ships to be fast, but am at a loss to understand the strategic importance of this in the Baltic region (something to do with the Germans? The relatively calm waters protected from the ravages of the Atlantic? Danish shipping lane regulations?!) The article gives a very good explanation for the tactical choices behind the design (speed in heavy weather, outrun light cruisers, shallow draught/freeboard etc.), but the reader is left wondering "yes but what for?". If it's normal not to include strategy/geopolitics in these narrow sorts of articles that's fine, but the mention of the Baltic Project without explanation incited a curiousity that the article did not sate.
    • The article doesn't do quite as good a job in explaining the rationale for gun choice as the other specifications. Do we know why the requirements were revised, why 18-inch guns were thought to be potentially unsatisfactory, why the secondary armaments were upgraded or the displacement and beam increased? Were "two BL 18-inch Mk I guns" standard for ships of this class? It's not clear why the third ship, Furious was designed differently from the first two.
      • Indeed, it's not clear, but this reflects my sources, most of which tend to skip over Furious's particular history. And much the same is true of its armament, annoyingly enough. My guess is that she got the 18-inch guns because Fisher wanted them, and for no other reason, but that would be OR, so I've not included it here.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 03:08, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • For an article of this length, the lead section seems a little light as a summary. In particular, if a topic is worth a subsection, it's generally worth a line in the lead (personal opinion only). For instance, I was surprised to first read that "The Courageous-class ships were the first large warships in the Royal Navy to have geared steam turbines" halfway into the article. This is the kind of thing a reader might scan the opening of many articles trying to track down.
    • I'm sure it's standard to list the specifications for general characteristics, propulsion, armaments and so on in a straightforward fashion, but as a reader unfamiliar with the standard measurements of ships of this type, I skimmed right over the statistics in these sections. Definitely not suggesting you add inane "the length of four football fields!" chatter, but you go to the trouble of giving layman's terms measurements (i.e. I know the ships were relatively fast, lightly armoured, mobile, large for light cruisers) and only occasionally tie these together ("To save design time, the installation used in the light cruiser Champion, the navy's first cruiser with geared turbines, was simply doubled.", "The 18-inch BL Mark I gun carried by Furious was derived from the 15-inch Mark I gun used in her half-sisters.")
    • The "Protection" section does a good job of detailing precise specifications while including enough comparative and explanatory content to keep a reader like me interested.
      • Thanks
    • I was curious as to where the sea trials for Courageuos took place, again with the notion that the ships would be used in the Baltic in my mind.
      • Added.
    • It might seem obvious to you or me that Britain was at war with Germany by the time the ships came into service, but a reader with an imprecise memory for dates might not immediately grasp it. A brief sentence outlining the state of play in the naval war (who had the upper hand/who controlled where/what the main tactical considerations were for the Admiralty) could neatly take care of this. For instance, it's interesting that the 1st CS, with Courageous-class ships optimised for speed weren't fast enough to catch the German light cruisers, but the reader is left wondering if this meant the British were technologically inferior and couldn't match the Germans' ability to design for speed.
      • As for your first point, it's pretty clearly spelled out in the lede that the ships were built during WWI and such a summary of the naval status as you want is far outside the remit of this article. Your second point is a very good one and I've added a sentence explaining that the Germans had too big of a lead.
    • The opening sentence of "Second Battle of Heligoland Bight" is a good example of what's missing at the beginning of the section. You establish the context, the intent of the Admiralty, and the tactical significance neatly in one go, leaving you free to get straight into the gritty details. One thing that wasn't clear was where all this was taking place (Baltic? North Sea? Skagerrak? Off the Norwegian coast?) – the only clue seemed to be the "Heligoland" in the subsection title – which made pointers like "The British continued in pursuit" and "the ships turned south" rather useless.
    • Please excuse the mind-numbing triviality/anal-retentiveness of this [but FAC has a reputation to uphold]: in the infobox, the |type= entry starts lowercase, while the |armour= entry starts uppercase; I'm not sure if there's a hard and fast rule either way, but it would be good to be consistent within the article as it looks a little off.
  • Points above notwithstanding, this is a well-written, neutral, appropriately referenced and structured article and an interesting read. Please take my "I know nothing about ships and didn't understand your article about ships" comments with liberal doses of salt! Well done, Skomorokh 11:22, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Support—Preceding unsigned comment added by Kirk (talk • contribs)

Looks good, couple of things.
  • Sorry to pile on but the problem I found was the actual Baltic Project article doesn't really explain it very well, the project predated the war, was a pet project of Fisher's, but the article starts in 1915 (and Fisher wasn't around much longer). In addition to explaining the Baltic Project, you might consider a second with some commentary since it was controversial ( Basically, it was a terrible idea - Fisher wasted a lot of money on this project & I thought the Admiralty kept changing those regulations to stop him from wasting more money hence Large Light cruisers).
  • In the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight the ships, both ships had taken damage from their own muzzle blasts made me wonder what this meant exactly, if it was a common problem or a design problem with the class; it sounds extremely abnormal to me. The article doesn't have a length problem, so I'd suggest describing the damage (the muzzle blasts caused x to happen which damaged y on the ship due to z flaw in the design). Then again, 5 days of repairs doesn't sound very significant - sounds like the railings got blown off or something simple like that. Kirk (talk) 14:44, 2 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
    • This one I'll have to think about some more. Damage from muzzle blast was extremely common among all capital ships, but rarely ever actually amounted to much, as demonstrated by only 5 days to repair. I don't want to get too deep into extraneous details here, but you make a good point in how much I can assume an average reader knows. Striking the balance is always difficult.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 03:08, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
More thoughts
  • support I like the article and its an interesting one, yet it feels incomplete. I realise the shift to carriers is the reason and that this part of the class' history is in a separate article but this article still needs IMHO to complete the cycle for the ships at least give a brief synopsis of what happened to the vessels in the class rather than leaving the story untold. Gnangarra 12:23, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
added my support Gnangarra 23:24, 4 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support -- well-written/sourced/illustrated; just one thing I think could be improved:—Preceding unsigned comment added by Ian Rose (talk • contribs) 02:28, August 10, 2010
    • In fact they could be considered the epitome of Fisher's belief in the paramount importance of speed over everything else. -- the initial part of this sentence sounds a bit like editorialising/OR, even though it may be supported by the subsequent citation. Could we say something like They were considered the epitome... or They have been seen as the epitome...?
      • That bit is me paraphrasing Roberts on how Fisher was willing to sacrifice everything else to get more speed. Roberts' comments are not specific to these ships, but rather to all the wartime battlecruisers which were much faster than any of the earlier battlecruisers so I'd prefer to keep the "could" in place.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 03:17, 10 August 2010 (UTC)[reply]


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