New Mexico-class battleship

The New Mexico class was a group of three United States Navy dreadnought battleships built in the late 1910s: New Mexico, Mississippi and Idaho. They were part of the standard series and in most respects copies of the preceding Pennsylvania class, with twelve 14-inch guns now of 50 caliber in four triple turrets, a clipper bow for better seakeeping, a better placed secondary battery and a top speed of 21 knots, and New Mexico carried an experimental turbo-electric drive while the other two had geared turbines. Congress authorized two ships, and the 1914 sale of two older Mississippi-class battleships to Greece paid for the third. The class was split among three yards: New Mexico was built at the New York Navy Yard, Idaho at New York Shipbuilding in Camden, and Newport News Shipbuilding built Mississippi, which was laid down there on 5 April 1915, launched on 25 January 1917 and commissioned that December. Mississippi fought at Surigao Strait, the last battleship engagement in history, and after the war served as a gunnery test ship that fired a Terrier missile in 1953 before she was sold for scrap in 1956; New Mexico and Idaho were scrapped soon after the war.