'', 1888 The
chief constructor,
Sir Edward Reed, was ill, so the design of this ship was entrusted to his assistant and brother-in-law,
Nathaniel Barnaby, himself a future chief constructor. For reasons that have not survived, the
Admiralty required that
Penelope to be a ship of unusually shallow draught, possibly in light of the operations in the shallow
Baltic Sea during the
Crimean War of 1854–1855. The ship was
long between perpendiculars and had a
beam of . She had a draught of forward and aft.
Penelope displaced and had a
tonnage of 3,096
tons burthen. She had a complement of 350 officers and
ratings. She was the first British capital ship to be fitted with a washroom.
Penelope had a pair of
Maudslay three-cylinder,
horizontal-return, connecting-rod steam engines, each driving a single propeller. The engines used steam provided by four
boilers with a working pressure of . The ship reached a speed of from during her
sea trials on 1 July 1868. She carried a maximum of 500 tons of coal, enough to steam at . Provision for the hoisting frames and twin
rudders forced a very unusual shape to the stern, which unintentionally greatly increased
drag. The other issue was that the shallowness of her draught made her very unhandy under sail, and she was described as "drifting to
leeward in a wind like a tea tray".
Penelope was
ship-rigged with three
masts and a sail area of . Her speed under sail alone was only . Her shallow draught gave her a
metacentric height of at
deep load, which made her a very steady gun platform.
Penelopes main armament of eight
rifled muzzle-loading (RML) guns was concentrated amidships in a
box battery. The guns at the corners of the battery were given additional
gun ports, embrasured into the sides of the hull, to give her a limited amount of end-on fire. The shell of the 8-inch gun weighed and was rated with the ability to penetrate of
wrought-iron armour. The ship mounted three
rifled breech-loading (RBL) Armstrong guns as
chase guns, one in the stern and two under the
forecastle in the
bow, although these were judged to be very ineffective weapons. She also carried a pair of
RBL 20-pounder Armstrong saluting guns. The
waterline wrought iron
armour belt of
Penelope covered her entire length. It was thick amidships, backed by of wood, and thinned to 5 inches towards the ends of the ship. It had a total height of , of which was below water and above. The sides of the box battery were also 6 inches thick, and its ends were protected by
bulkheads. Between the battery and the belt was a
strake of 6-inch armour, also closed off by 4.5-inch bulkheads. ==Construction and career==