HMS Nile was a battleship of the Royal Navy of the Victorian era, a ship of the Trafalgar class, and the only sister-ship of HMS Trafalgar.

She was the last British battleship to be completed with a single citadel; all subsequent capital ships had separate citadels fore and aft. Also, she was the first British battleship to mount a secondary armament of quick-firing guns – guns in which the charge and shell are combined together in a cartridge which is loaded as a single unit. She was originally designed to mount eight 5-inch breech-loaders as her secondary armament, but the marginally smaller 4.7-inch (120 mm) guns were substituted in January 1890 when their superiority over the breech-loaders became clear. The quick-firers were able to fire, on tests, ten rounds per gun in one minute and twenty seconds; a rate some four times faster than the breech-loaders they replaced. As it was accepted at the time that hits from any calibre gun of 4 inches (100 mm) or more could be expected to disable a torpedo-boat or a destroyer (formerly known as torpedo-boat destroyers), it was apparent that a rate of fire, and an assumed rate of hitting, four times greater, had to relate to a superior anti-torpedo armament.

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