 Prompted by the launch of and misinformation about HMS Dreadnought , the US Navy and Congress faced what they perceived as a vastly better battleship than the two South Carolina battleships then under construction , which were designed under tonnage constraints that Congress had imposed on capital ships . Actually , the South Carolinas were inferior only in speed to Dreadnought ; they carried fewer heavy guns but , unlike Dreadnought , could bring all of them to bear on the broadside . Because of this , they could fire an equal weight of metal . Also , because greater time and care had been taken with their armor and bulkhead arrangement , they were better protected than the British ship . None of this was realized at the time . Nevertheless , the Navy 's Bureau of Construction and Repair ( C & R ) had struggled tremendously to design an adequate warship under congressional limits and had taken battleship design as far under those restrictions as it could . Seeing now that those limits had become unrealistic , Congress ended them ; any subsequent constraints would be dictated by treaty limitations . The language of the authorizing act of June 26 , 1906 was for a battleship " carrying as heavy armor and as a powerful armament as any known vessel of its class , to have the highest practicable speed and the greatest practicable radius of action . " 
