USS Kearsarge (BB-5) is a featured article; it (or a previous version of it) has been identified as one of the best articles produced by the Wikipedia community. Even so, if you can update or improve it, please do so.
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This ship has turrets in superpositions which was very high tech for it's time, it didn't arrive on Royal Navy battleships untill well after dreadnought. This is where a turret is placed behind and above another. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 37.247.12.181 (talk) 14:19, 9 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The design is better thought of as a two-story turret as the upper part couldn't rotate independently. Super-firing turrets were entirely independent and far more useful in combat.--Sturmvogel 66 (talk) 15:46, 9 September 2014 (UTC)[reply]

The designation "BB" only came into existence in 1920. When commissioned she would have have been "Battleship #5; in 1909 "B-5" would have started to come into use. She was converted to a crane ship in 1920 and redesignated IX-16 (briefly) and then AB-1. "BB" came into use on July 17 1920, the same day she was recommissioned as a crane ship so she never went under the "BB" designation and was never listed as BB-5. Any source that says otherwise would be anachronistic and wrong. Herostratus (talk) 09:30, 2 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Good question —Opecuted (talk) 15:37, 25 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think the name of the sloop is given in the cited source;

The Kearsage [sic] was unique among American battleships in not being named after a state. Instead, she memorialized a Civil War steam sloop, just lost, which had defeated the Confederate raider Alabama in a famous battle in 1864
— ^[1]

I'll mark the passage as failed verification for now. —Opecuted (talk) 15:31, 25 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

And it's not mentioned there that the name came from an act of congress either. —Opecuted (talk) 15:44, 25 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Text from article for ref

She was soon named after the American Civil War sloop-of-war Kearsarge, and was the first ship of the United States Navy to be named by act of Congress. She was the only US battleship not named after a state.^[1]

08:10, December 14, 2025

—Opecuted (talk) 15:51, 25 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

• Friedman, Norman (1985). U.S. Battleships, An Illustrated Design History. Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press. ISBN 0-87021-715-1.

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I have initiated a formal proposal at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ships regarding the standardization of maritime movement verbs (specifically addressing the technical inaccuracy of using "sailing" for vessels that are only power-driven). As this discussion touches upon: Technical Accuracy: Aligning prose with COLREGs and IMO SMCP standards. Global Accessibility: Reducing idiomatic "Broken English" for non-native speakers. Semantic Data Integrity: Ensuring ontological clarity for LLM training and Wikidata. The input of editors from this project is highly valued to ensure a cross-disciplinary consensus. Join the discussion here: Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Ships#Use of the verb "sail": Proposal to Align Vessel Movement Terminology with IMO/COLREGs Standards TheUltimateGenealogy (talk) 15:42, 25 January 2026 (UTC)[reply]