In a strange way the French ships, while ugly, were also quite fascinating.

I used to agree with this list, but for some reason lately I've grown quite fond of these designs.

Come on, the Charles Martel class were beautiful

Never thought the Chesters looked bad

I love those pre-dreadnought battleships.

A number of these warships should be in the 'Steampunk' Navy !

I rather fancy those weird French pre-dreadnoughts. When something gets so ugly it gets beautiful. Like an English bulldog. I hope World of Warships implements them as a tier II premium freebie or something

I don't think the Chester class is ugly. Its design could be called plain, bland or dull but not ugly.

Oh,they are all Beautiful in certain ways.Drink another beer and watch this again.

I did not find one in the least bit "ugly" absolutely beautiful all of them!

Ah, the French with their penchant for building warships that look like heavily armed, seagoing apartment buildings . . . tres amusant . . .

I wish World of Warships added one of those French BB's as a premium tier 2 or something

Some of them don't even look like ships.

Not an entirely fair assessment in that many in the list were monitors, which were actually just floating batteries, having a very shallow draft and not really seagoing ships. So obviously they looked odd or "ugly". The original monitors - Monitor and Virginia(Merrimack) - looked ugly too.

The French vessels' narrowed freeboard beam made for cluttered top-hamper, a tangled forest just begging to be made into shrapnel by every indirect hit. They tried to squeeze a ballroom into a parlor. The theory of curved freeboard to deflect shells, shed heavy seas, and give the strength of the arch to a normally cantilevered main deck was ingenious and ambitious, but counterproductive for fighting ability.

The General Wolfe, Lord Clive, and the Faa de Bruno looked very fascinating.

The Borodino class looks decent.

In my opinion the French ships look good but in a different way

Good selection, though not so sure I'd have added the Russian Borodino Class BB's into the pot. I'd probably have exchanged it for the supremely ugly French Gloire Class cruisers of the early 1900's. Those things were so ugly they had to infest them with rats just to get the ships cats to stay on board! :O) And it isn't just me saying this, I remember reading a poll once upon a time in which the Gloires were rated as the ugliest warships ever to sail. The Italian Littorio Class BB's were considered the best looking with the Roma being crowned the most beautiful warship ever built. The French seemed to have a real talent for designing horrible ships in the run up to WW1, although with the Dunkerque's and Richelieu's they did finally manage to put together some that looked pretty cool (IMHO).

The Charles Martel reminds me of the large wooden battleships in the age of sail

Nice choices. I think a lot of the French ships were derivatives of the Charles Martel, hence the tumblehome sides and fighting tops. Spectacular to be sure!

2:48 well I would respect the Lord Clive,after all,it has 18 inch guns

*Love to see this, great work bros!!!*

No way ,all of them are gorgeous , mid-late XIX Century is full of terrific looking ships ,just take a look on the HMS Warrior ,is awesome

they don't need to be pretty, they just need to get the job done

Novgorod, seriously what kind of scientific breakthrough were the Russians going for in building a floating raft with six props instead of a ship

I expected 10 French ships.

I'm surprised the HMS Rodney/Nelson and the IJN Fuso/Yamashiro/Hyuga didn't make the list. The superstructure on the Rodney/Nelson was so far back to the end of the ship with overlapping turrets in a pyramid formation. As for the IJN Fuso/Yamashiro/Hyuga, the superstructure was a literal fucking tower. How do they manage to balance it?

I have a wierd "fetish" for those french ships

The Charles Martel class.... Brilliant ! If I can't find a model kit I'll have to build one from scratch !

18 inch guns were built sooner than we thought

YES I LOVE THIS VIDEO, never knew the french liked to make ironclads look like floating factories, at least thats what the Charles Martel looks like to me 3:43 Will you be doing another one of these videos?

Music from the Good, the Bad, and the Ugliest.

Considering the time frame of these ships they were on the cutting edge of technology for the time frame. By today's standards they definitely FUGLY. But if you take into consideration some of them were not bad looking vessels an my only concern was the basic design did not appear to be very sea worthy in much more than a mild sea.

One can argue that the french are responsible for the Borodinos too :P. Btw I wasn't aware that the popovka's (Vice admiral Popov and Novgorod) were classified as monitors? Does it count when they don't have a turret?

wow so interesting please do another one

Lol the Massena is my favorite ship.

Excellent music choice

Interesting that reverse camber hulls and wave-piercing bows are now considered innovative

#6 looks like an accessorized civil war iron clad .

some weird looking ships there but you have to remember that the "ram" was considered the main way to sink an enemy in the days of these ships so they went to extreme lengths to have one which means the hulls have to be wide giving them the odd look to allow for the damage caused in running in to something big apart from that loved the collection

I thought you were picking on the poor Frogs. The choice to have such pronounced tumblehomes was, at the time, quite reasonable and a rational decision given the many other constraints they faced. That doing so also made them effectively unusable as gunnery-platforms wasn't their fault.Loved the music, by the way. Good choice, especially given the utterly desperate situation that must be in effect for any of the Monitors in particular to find themselves in combat.

Some of the French ships look like there was hardly any freeboad. Seems like they would overwash in moderately heavy seas and be swamped.

The picture of the Chester Class ship @ :30 seconds was taken on a small spit of land that juts out into Portsmouth Harbor NH. For three years I would drive to work with the same view.

When I saw the Hoche I actually said out loud “what the fuck is that?”

Those Ironclads are so fucking beautiful...

Different times, different ideas - have you looked at some of the so called moder warships?

In a pretty weird way, the French managed to make ugly ships seem quite weirdly interesting and whimsical, they look like the warships you'd see in comics or anime, etc.

This music is amazing!!!

Uss maine gun layout looks wonky as hell

That video is basically a list of french pre dreadnaughts

The last one has got the cannon ports from a wooden warship on it!

The Chester class looks kinda odd but not so ugly. The rest yeah pretty ugly.

I’d choose a strong ugly warship over a beautiful yet weak warship.

Ok the chester looks quite good not as ugly by far have you seen some bb from 1920?

Those French ships did look interesting though

Could accuse Navyfieldguy of Francophobia but, the evidence speaks for itself. Massena looks like a sea-monster! Thankfully the British monitors helped to balance the presentation. But then they were only ever shallow draught platforms for big, old guns. Speaking of which, the Italian monitor looks like a waterborne Dalek! And, I'm wondering whether the Borodino class were circular so that the enemy couldn't work out which bit to fire at! Chester Class? Well, American aren't they!? Great vid mate.

Is there any such thing as a good looking monitor?

If I was a war ship , I would not want any recycled steel from any of those ugly boats . It would be too much shame .

Beside the ugliness, were pre Dreadnoughts effective. I do know that they had success in the russian japanese war and the Spanish American war, but other than that were they any good?

you are looking at these vessels out of their time. so your term is insulting.

They were not ugly they were transitorial ships experimenting new guns and new tactics .if you go that way the newest low visibility ships are not so nice!? anyway it all a question of personal point of wiew. best regards and sorry for my poor inglish.

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Not only were the french ships ugly, I'm surprised none of them were shown with a white flag flying on them. Seriously, have the french ever not surrendered the minute they had to fight? If it wasn't for the Americans everyone in france would be speaking German today.

Wow- that Chester class is kind of ugly and weirdly high all along and especially at the bow, but for a ship of that era I'm positively shocked at the high freeboard all around.

Ugly does not necessarily mean ineffective. Our own Q-ships disguised themselves as merchant vessels in both world wars before lulling U-boats in so they could be fired upon.

So much for French Aesthetics XD

Your right! Half of them dont even look like war ships. Good song too! Lol!

Those French really love a good Tumblehome with very little freeboard. Can't forget the ram bow.

I Like the Borodinos and the Martel's. I guess it depends on what your idea of beauty happens to be. These are fascinating glimpses of the past; symbols of a new Industrial Age.

Wow!

Borodinos isnt looks ugly i love them

My eyes..... my eyes... Thank you for a bit of fun

The swimming frisbee boat was ugly, the rest was gorgeous.

Anyone who's ever played Monopoly should recognize Magenta!

The headline needs to be rephrased for unsightly looking warships.

To me beauty and ugly is like a big loop: you reach the point of something being so incredibly ugly that it starts to look beautiful.

And your point is??? Warships are not sports cars. You cannot fault an rhinoceros for not looking more like a gazelle! The American WWI era battleships were no beauty queens yet they got the job done in WWII. The American Omaha class of cruisers were awful looking ships yet, again, they got the job done.The American civil war Union navy "Monitor" looked as silly as hell yet it lent it's name to an entire class of warships.

Chester wasn't ugly in my opinion And bordina was like any other pre dreadnought battleship Like most on this list. I love ugly ships since they are full of character. Wtf why is Charles Martin class on here.

You know, lift any one of these tubs out of the water and she wouldn't look out of place in one of the more steampunkish shonen anime/manga.

No 1 = How to design the eyesore warrior of the seas.

The borodino wasn't that bad. The steam exhaust pipes. Yes they made it ugly. With some sales it would've been a different story. I can't sympathize with the chester, that was one ugly ass fucking ship.

A warship, a killing machine should look pretty?

If you survive the battle, any boat is beautiful.

Number 6 is what monopoly based the battleship piece of.

these ships are where Steampunk was born...

Spaghetti western navies ??? BTW ... I'd be happy to own any of these ship .... all beautiful to me :)

Essentially two categories: french pre dreadnoughts and monitors. Monitors are ugly, period. In the late ninetenth century the french navy ran amok, trying to find some magical recipe to fill the gap with the Royal Navy. Hence all those weird towering but barely floating tumblehome hulled castles.

I would leave off the Chester and put in the German ironclads of the Sachsen class (1874). Their four funnels arranged in a square configuration earned them the nickname "The Cement Factory." The layout of their six gun main armament was also idiosyncratic and never repeated. It's hardly fair that the French made so many battleships to basically the same bizarre configuration, over several decades, that they end up over-represented. But the Hoche is my all time favorite, and would be #1 for me were it not for the Faa di Bruno, which I had never heard of before seeing this.

0:59 isn't that a Scottish flag on that Russian ship? Not keen on my flags just curious. Any info works thanks

I thought the USS Chester was elegant looking and not even close to ugly.

The HMS Rodney(Nelson?) is a homely boat..

UNPOPULAR OPPION But I think that the USS Chester is actually beautiful, she looks like she would have made a beautiful ocean liner

Yup, the French had a talent. Drachinifel referred to the Masséna as the most visually offensive of all French pre Dreadnaughts.

The good, the bad and the ugly soundtrack. But this time it’s just the the ugly.

Most French pre-dreadnoughts have a face only a mother could love, and then 'Courbet' came along and things changed...ish

Borodino is very beautiful

Excluding monitors, for obvious reasons, many of these ships must have been "under water" in any kind of rough sea. In many cases the design "aided" water in climbing up into the ship! Not only were they ugly, but totally impractical.

I tried to search for more info on the Faa di Bruno. I was looking for the ship, but turns out the man was a priest and mathematicion, beatified by the Pope.

Don't know about ugliest... Quite a few of them were pretty standard for the type and for the time.. A bit surprised not to see Russian battleship Navarin (upturned chair, with its four smokestacks in a square) on this list :)