This week’s optional topic: Worst/weirdest designs. A great example is the Vitse-admiral Popov, a Russian warship designed in the 1870s. With Russia’s Black Sea Fleet limited by treaty after the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II approved a proposal by Vice Admiral Alexei Popov to experiment with a perfectly round, flat-boomed warship. Along with its sister ship  the Novgorod, were designed to create a vessel with the heaviest guns and armor possible, along with a spar torpedo to explode enemy ships that sailed too close.

These Roombas of the Sea proved a failure due, it appears, to a fatal design flaw: their engines could not produce enough steam to power the small outboard torpedoes. The vessels tended to roll and pitch in the Black Sea, had trouble gaining steam, and proved almost impossible to steer. Nonetheless, the Popov and Novgorod saw limited action in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, where their deficiencies caused them to be used primarily for coastal defense. Although some in the Imperial Navy suggested the vessels could work better with a redesign of the propellers and engine system, cost-cutting prevented them from implementing these changes. The Popov remained in service through 1911.