And so to the Japanese Matsushima class and their fearsome main armament of [checks notes] one gun.

Ah.

In the 1880s two facts dawned on the Imperial Japanese Navy.

The first was that taking on the Chinese fleet with just two small cruisers was unlikely to meet with much success.

The other was that they didn't have much experience of building modern warships.

Unfortunately, because they didn't have much experience of building modern warships, the Japanese turned to the French for help.

Naturally the loveable rogues of French naval design leapt at the chance to design a whole other navy to their own idiosyncratic standards.

Louis-Émile Bertin, promisingly described by Wikipedia as "often at odds with conventional wisdom", was promptly dispatched eastwards with the instruction to do something stupid.

He duly obliged.

Bertin was a proponent of the Jeune Ecole theory of naval warfare. This basically stated that a smaller navy could punch above its weight if only you put big enough guns and torpedoes on everything.

Presumably "Jeune Ecole" is French for 'schoolboy error'.

It's important to note that what followed wasn't totally insane.

The Imperial Japanese Navy would need large guns to take on the Chinese battlefleet. The presence of large guns implies a large ship to mount them on. Regrettably, however, Japan simply didn't have the dockyards to host large battleships...

Bertin's solution was to whack 13-inch guns onto his design and keep removing them until he found a solution that probably wouldn't roll over as soon as it was launched.

At the point Bertin got down to just one gun he seems to have given up and crossed his fingers instead...

Perhaps he should have thought a bit harder.

The resulting class of three warships - Matsushima, Itsukushima and Hashidate - were not a success.

The biggest problem - as you'd expect - was that honking great gun. Bertin had still fitted one too many.

The ships couldn't absorb the recoil, and firing in any direction other than the centreline threatened capsize. To aim you had to point the whole ship.

The gun itself wasn't much to write home about either.: the firing rate has been quoted at either one or two shells.

Per hour.

When you can deliver your main ordnance faster by Royal Mail it's time to reconsider the choices that got you here.

And in the case of Matsushima the gun faced backwards, so it was only really useful when running away - although with a sedate 16 knot top speed that was unlikely to be a war-winning plan either.

Nonetheless the Matsushima class were sent to fight the Chinese.

At the Battle of Yalu River the big guns managed to fire an underwhelming thirteen shells. Between them. In a whole day of fighting.

Weirdly, the class survived until 1926, and despite being already obsolete fought at the legendary Battle of Tsushima.

The Matsushima itself blew up in 1908.

Bertin had already been sent back to France before his designs saw battle. The fact they were crap can't have helped, but the disappearance of the Unebi - another unstable French design - was probably responsible for the loss of confidence.

Chastened by his Japanese experience, Bertin never again built anything that defied basic logic or nautical good sense...

Hang on.

What fresh hell is this?