due to the experimental nature of the design to delay placing orders for any other ships until Dreadnought and her trials had been completed. Once the design had been finalised the hull form was designed and tested at the Admiralty's experimental ship tank at Gosport. Seven iterations were required before the final hull form was selected. Once the design was finalized, a team of three assistant engineers and 13 draughtsmen produced detailed drawings. To assist in speeding up the ship's construction, the internal hull structure was simplified as much as possible and an attempt was made to standardize on a limited number of standard plates, which varied only in their thickness. Description Overview Dreadnought was significantly larger than the two ships of the Lord Nelson class, which were under construction at the same time. She had an overall length of , a beam of , and a draught of at deep load. She displaced at normal load and at deep load, almost more than the earlier ships. She had a metacentric height of at deep load and a complete double bottom. Officers were customarily housed aft, but Dreadnought reversed the old arrangement, so that the officers were closer to their action stations. This was very unpopular with the officers, not least because they were now berthed near the noisy auxiliary machinery while the turbines made the rear of the ship much quieter than they had been in earlier steamships. This arrangement lasted among the British dreadnoughts until the of 1910. The crew numbered 700 officers and ratings in 1907, but increased to 810 in 1916. Propulsion Vickers, Sons & Maxim was the prime contractor for the ship's machinery, but as they had no large turbine experience, they sourced them from Parsons. Dreadnought was the first battleship to use turbines in place of the older reciprocating triple-expansion steam engines. She had two paired sets of direct-drive turbines, each of which drove two diameter, three-bladed propellers using steam provided by 18 Babcock & Wilcox boilers that had a working pressure of . The turbines, rated at , were intended to give a maximum speed of 21 knots; the ship reached from during her sea trials on 9 October 1906. Dreadnought carried of coal, and an additional of fuel oil that was to be sprayed on the coal to increase its burn rate. At full capacity, she could steam for at a speed