Kearsarge-class battleship

The Kearsarge class was a pair of pre-dreadnought battleships built for the United States Navy in the 1890s, USS Kearsarge and USS Kentucky. Their design sat between the low-freeboard Indiana class and the high-freeboard Iowa, and added quick-firing guns and better armor. The most unusual feature was a two-story turret, with a secondary 8-inch gun turret fixed on top of each primary 13-inch turret. Both ships were built at Newport News Shipbuilding between 1896 and 1900 and entered service in 1900. They were driven by two vertical triple-expansion steam engines fed by coal-fired Scotch boilers. After service as training ships in the First World War, Kentucky was sold for scrap in 1923, while Kearsarge worked as a crane ship for about twenty years and was sold to ship breakers in 1955.