5. This Ship’s Defects Were Cartoonish
To compound the hapless Novgorod’s woes, the ship’s wide flat bottom meant that in rough seas, she pitched so much that her propellers came out of the water. The blunt hull did not slice through the sea so as to reduce its resistance but pushed large volumes of water out of the way by sheer brute force. That made the ship very fuel-inefficient, and she consumed coal at a prodigious rate. In addition to design defects, the Novgorod was plagued with defects of manufacture as well. Low-quality materials and poor workmanship led to persistent problems with the ship’s propulsion, from blades to shaft to drive, that lasted for the vessel’s entire career.
Additionally, the vessel suffered from poor ventilation that no amount of troubleshooting could fix. Even the installation of ventilation cowls on the gun emplacements failed to fix the problem. As to the Novgorod’s core function as a combat ship, it was plagued with problems there as well. Its pair of eleven-inch guns had an exceptionally slow rate of fire, at ten minutes per shot. The rotating mounts on which the guns were placed were also slow, and took three minutes to traverse 180 degrees. The problem was exacerbated by weak locks that caused the gun mounts to rotate on their own from the guns’ recoil. And when the guns fired, the ship could rotate uncontrollably.
