Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 22, Number 26, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 December 1900 — WARSHIP BIDS OPEN. [ARTICLE]

WARSHIP BIDS OPEN.

Navy Department Has Estimates for Eleven New Vessels. Bids have been opened at the Navy Department for the construction of five new battleships and six armored cruisers, aggregating a total displacement of 154,000 tons, and comprising the largest consignment of material for the navy ever contracted for at a single bidding. Three of the five new battleships, the Pennsylvania, the New Jersey, the Georgia, the Virginia and the Rhode Island, are to be sheathed and coppered and will carry superimposed turrets; the other two are to be unsheathed vessels, having the “quadrilateral arrangement” of eight-inch turrets. Each ship will carry four 12-inch guns. These are of the extraordinary length of forty calibers, or twenty feet in the bore, of the new type just turned out by the ordnance bureau, and superior in efficiency to any 12-inch giin in the world, and at least equal to the 13-inch guns which have marked the maximum caliber In the American navy. In the three sheathed vessels, a pair of 8-inch guns will be mounted on the top of each of the 12-inch turrets. Four other 8-inch guns will be distributed in two turrets amidships on these two vessels. The unsheathed vessels will have eight 8-inch guns mounted in four independent turrets. Both classes of vessels, sheathed, and unsheathed, will have a broadside of twelve 6-inch rapid-fire guns on the main deck, besides twelve 14-pound-ers, twelve 2-pounders and a number of automatic guns, making the battery more formidable than any afloat as far as ability to concentrate fire and to throw weight of metal is concerned. In the matter of defensive power the battleships of both classes are unsurpassed.