Committee. The ship's design was finally approved on 12 June 1897, although design changes continued to be made that slowed the ship's construction. Construction and sea trials Construction of Potemkin began on 27 December 1897 and she was laid down at the Nikolayev Admiralty Shipyard on 10 October 1898. She was named in honour of Prince Grigory Potemkin, a Russian soldier and statesman. The ship was launched on 9 October 1900 and transferred to Sevastopol for fitting out on 4 July 1902. She began sea trials in September 1903 and these continued, off and on, until early 1905 when her gun turrets were completed. Description Potemkin was long at the waterline and long overall. She had a beam of and a maximum draught of . The battleship displaced , more than her designed displacement of . The ship's crew consisted of 26 officers and 705 enlisted men. Potemkin had a pair of three-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each of which drove one propeller, that had a total designed output of . Twenty-two Belleville boilers provided steam to the engines at a pressure of . The 8 boilers in the forward boiler room were oil-fired and the remaining 14 were coal-fired. During her sea trials on 31 October 1903, she reached a top speed of . Leaking oil caused a serious fire on 2 January 1904 that caused the navy to convert her boilers to coal firing at a cost of 20,000 rubles. The ship carried a maximum of of coal at full load that provided a range of at a speed of . Armament The battleship's main battery consisted of four 40-calibre guns mounted in twin-gun turrets fore and aft of the superstructure. The electrically operated turrets were derived from the design of those used by the s. These guns had a maximum elevation of +15° and their rate of fire was very slow, only one round every four minutes during gunnery trials. They fired a shell at a muzzle velocity of . At an elevation of +10° the guns had a range of . Potemkin carried 60 rounds for each gun. The sixteen 45-calibre, Canet Pattern 1891 quick-firing (QF) guns were mounted in casemates. Twelve of these were placed on the sides of the hull and the other four were positioned at the corners of the superstructure. They fired shells that weighed with a muzzle velocity of . They