steaming and she proved to be a prodigious consumer of coal as her capacity of only gave her range of at full speed. The ship had ventilation problems throughout her career, despite later fitting a large ventilation cowl over the central hatch of the barbette. Novgorod was armed with two 20-calibre 11-inch rifled muzzle-loading guns. The guns could penetrate 11 inches of armour at a range of ; their shells had a muzzle velocity of . Their rate of fire was very slow, about one round every 10 minutes. The guns were mounted on separate revolving turntables that could be moved independently or locked together. Each turntable took about two or three minutes to rotate 180°. Gunnery trials in November 1874 showed that the locks for the turntables were too weak; so much so that the gun's recoil could cause them to rotate, leading to the persistent myth that the whole ship rotated when a gun fired. Reinforcement of the locks solved the problem, but the myth persisted. Protection The ship had a waterline belt of wrought iron that completely covered the hull and extended from above the waterline to below it. The armour was configured in two strakes, each high. The upper plates were thick and the lower ones . The armour was backed by 9 inches of teak reinforced by interlocking channel irons. The navy considered this backing to be the equivalent of another of armour. Novgorod was the first Russian ironclad to place her armament in a barbette mounting. It was high and was built in the same manner as the upper strake of the belt. The rounded deck was protected by a total of of armour, made up of three layers of plates ranging in thickness from . The lower portion of the funnels and the base of the engine room skylight had armour plates thick. Construction and career The Treaty of Paris that ended the Crimean War of 1854–56 limited the Imperial Russian Navy to only six corvettes in the Black Sea, so the royal shipyard in Sevastopol was leased to the Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company. This meant that any ironclads built for Black Sea service would have to be built in Saint Petersburg, disassembled, and then shipped to a port there for reassembly. The long-dormant facility at Nikolaev was chosen and the navy began ordering machinery and tools from Britain to re-equip