he heavily subdivided the hull to limit the amount of water that could enter through any one hit and placed coal bunkers above the armoured deck to absorb the fragments from exploding shells. Unbeknownst to his critics, Collingwood was tested in 1884 with her ends and the large spaces in her hold ballasted with water and her draught only increased by and she lost a minor amount of speed. The price was that the ship lacked buoyancy at her ends and tended to bury her bow in oncoming waves rather than be lifted over them. Her speed was greatly reduced in a head sea and the resulting spray made working the guns very difficult. Collingwood tended to roll heavily and was not regarded as a good seaboat. Despite these issues, her basic configuration was followed by most subsequent British ironclads and predreadnought battleships until the revolutionary of 1905. The ship had a length between perpendiculars of , a beam of , and a draught of at deep load. She displaced at normal load and had a complement of 498 officers and ratings. The ship was powered by a pair of 2-cylinder inverted compound-expansion steam engines, each driving one propeller. The Humphreys engines produced a total of at normal draught and with forced draught, using steam provided by a dozen cylindrical boilers with a working pressure of . She was designed to reach a speed of at normal draught and Collingwood reached from on her sea trials, using natural draught. She was the first British ironclad to be equipped with forced draught and the ship only reached a speed of from while using it during her sea trials because her engines were incapable of handling the additional steam. Collingwood carried a maximum of of coal that gave her a range of at a speed of . Armament and armour The ship had a main armament of 25-calibre rifled breech-loading (BL) Mk II guns. The four guns were mounted in two twin-gun barbettes, one forward and one aft of the superstructure. The barbettes were open, without hoods or gun shields, and the guns, mounted on a turntable, were fully exposed. They could only be loaded when pointed fore and aft with an elevation of 13°. The shells fired by these guns were credited with the ability to penetrate of wrought iron at , using a charge of of prismatic brown powder. At