I like big ships and I cannot lie.

You don't need a big ship to go pillaging and raiding with -- in fact, the Oseberg ship, the iconic "Viking" craft, and ships like it actually put a premium on shallow draft, so they could raid up and down rivers and streams. The Oseberg ship is only about 21.5 meters (say 72 feet) long, and had a likely draft of a meter or less. But ships like it helped the Norse raid and conquer all over northern Europe, and the design was widely copied elsewhere.

You don't even need ships or boats as large as that to make long voyages -- though it was not of his own volition, William Bligh (amazing navigator, shit administrator) sailed 4,000 miles in an open launch after the mutiny on the HMS Bounty.

But big ships are just cool. So let's talk about some.

English/British Wooden Naval Vessels

In the time period I study, ships in the British navy were divided into six "rates" based on the number of guns, and hence the crew, they carried. HMS Victory is probably the most famous first-rate in existence (though to be fair, it's the only first-rate still in existence). And it's big -- about 3,500 tons displacement, 227' long overall, 51"10" on the beam and drawing 28'9" if it were to be put back in the water (it's permanently dry-docked). It carried nominally 104 guns, though short-range carronades and things like swivel guns weren't usually counted in that total; and was one of the largest and most powerful ships of its age.

The Victory, of course, might only be the second most famous preserved ship in Europe -- the Swedish Vasa, which sank on her maiden voyage in 1628, was about the same length as Victory though with a much narrower beam and shorter draft (which contributed to her capsizing), and carrying only 64 guns. The ship was raised in 1961, at the end of a five-year salvage mission, and is still being conserved.

Even during Victory's time, though, it was overshadowed by a true behemoth -- the Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad. To borrow from a previous answer:

The Spanish navy established a large shipyard at Havana in the early 1700s, which was building nearly a third of all its ships by the 1750s. (Ships had been built in the Caribbean before then[4] , of course.) The Havana yard built ships of tropical hardwoods; the Nuestra Señora de la Santísima Trinidad was probably the most famous. Santísima Trinidad was originally built to carry 112 guns, but her forecastle and quarterdeck were later joined to produce a fourth gun deck and she carried up to 140 guns, making her the largest ship-of-the-line during the Napoleonic wars. She was captured at Trafalgar and wrecked in the storm that followed the battle.

But as large as all those ships were, the Lancastrian navy under Henry V may have built the largest wooden ship in English history. The Grace Dieu is thought to have been about 2,800 tons displacement, but her building type was such that she had an absolutely enormous bow and stern section. This graphic compares it to the Victory, Vasa, Henry Grace a Dieu, and Sovereign of the Seas. The ship is at rest in the river Hamble.

British Naval Vessels Made of Steel

The poor departed HMS Hood is quite possibly the most famous British ship of the interwar period, and probably of WWII in general. The ship was the last battlecruiser built by the Royal Navy -- the battlecruiser concept, though seriously flawed, had its roots in the Admiralty's prewar administration of Jacky Fisher. The idea was that the ship would be armed with a battleship's armament and equipped with a battleship's power plant, but dispense with the battleship's armor, in order to trade protection for speed. Unfortunately, the battlecruisers became part of the line of battle despite their lack of protection, and at Jutland, three blew up and sank (this is the unfortunately named HMS Invincible in two parts, resting on the floor of the North Sea.).

Anyhow, the Hood displaced 46,600 long tons (52,280 tons) at full load, was 860' long, 104' wide and drew 32' of water; although it was armed with "only" eight guns compared to Victory's 104, they were the new British 15" (381 mm), firing a shell weighing just shy of 2,000 pounds up to 33,550 yards from the ship, almost 19 miles. The ship was the pride of the British navy, sleek, fast and deadly. It was destroyed when a salvo from Bismarck caused a magazine deflagration during the Battle of the Denmark Strait in May 1941; only three of her crew of 1,418 survived.

So since we mentioned Jutland, maybe we should talk about its connection to a famous and unusual shipwreck, that of HMS Victoria (seen here in happier times, as they say). Victoria was named for the Queen, of course, and when launched was the largest and best-armed ironclad warship in the world; it was attached to the British navy's prestigious Mediterranean Fleet, and when operating in formations with its sister ship Sans Pareil the ships were called "the slippers" for their profiles when their bows disappeared under even moderate seas, as they were wont to do -- as you can see, Victoria had its heavy armament forward and not much freeboard. The bow of Victoria, as was usual at the time, was fitted with a ram, as were those of its sister ships.

In the summer for 1893, the British fleet was at its summer exercises off Tripoli; the fleet was commanded by Vice-Admiral Sir George Tryon, a man who was gruff and impatient even by Victorian standards and who drilled the fleet endlessly in all manner of evolution, commanded by means of a signal flag system he had developed. He famously had a history of not telling his subordinate officers of his intentions during maneuvers, leaving it up to them to exercise initiative, while also demanding immediate, unquestioning obedience to orders.

On 22 June 1893, Tyron was sailing his fleet in two columns of ships, about six cables (1,000 feet apart). He had announced his intention to have the two columns turn towards one another 180 degrees, reversing course, and to fall in at anchor; although this was well inside the safe turning distance of the ships (that is, it was too close for the ships to turn towards one another without causing a collision) he reaffirmed the order after being questioned by a subordinate. The ships turned toward one another with HMS Camperdown at the head of the other column; when it became clear a collision was imminent, both ship captains waited for further orders, with Victoria's asking Tyron for permission three times to set the engines astern.

They didn't stop in time, and Victoria's hull was pierced by Camperdown. Victoria had been sailing with doors and hatches unsecured for ventilation; she rolled to starboard and sank within 13 minutes. The ship sank with the propellors still driving -- the engine room crew never received the order to abandon ship -- and currently stands vertically in the ocean bottom.

Tyron went down with the ship, but a notable survivor was Victoria's executive officer, John Jellicoe, later the commander of the British fleet at Jutland, which was by far the biggest battle between dreadnought battleships in history.

So what's a dreadnought battleship, you ask? Well, it's one named after HMS Dreadnought, another of the biggest of its era. Dreadnought, though smaller than its progeny Hood, was enormous for its time, at 18,120 long tons displacement and 527 feet long. But its design is what revolutionized capital ship construction -- rather than mounting a mixture of large and small guns as battleships of Victoria's era did, Dreadnought had an all-big-gun main armament of 10 12"/45 caliber rifles. She was also the first battleship to use turbine engines, rather than reciprocating steam engines; these two factors combined to lend her name to the entire design scheme of future battleships and also to render the world's other battleships immediately obsolete.

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OK folks, I'm hitting the character limit and need to stop for lunch! Tune in this afternoon for some American battleships and a famous Great Lakes wreck!

The Eastern Front of WWII was incredibly huge - the largest conflict ever.

The front was almost 2000 miles long, and involved more than 30 million troops over 4 years.

Total casualties were as much as 14.7 million for the Soviet armies and 5.5 million for Axis forces. Only one battle- the Battle of Stalingrad- had nearly 2 million casualties total. And as many as 20 million Soviet/occupied civilians were murdered over the course of the conflict.

Which shows that the stakes were colossal as well: the genocide and enslavement of Eastern Europe if the Axis had won, an atrocity dwarfing even the Holocaust, and the destruction of Nazi Germany and the subjugation of Eastern Europe to Communism when the Soviets won.

Source: Glantz, The Soviet -German war 1941-1945: Myths and Realities

This exact day is also the anniversary of the battle with the BIGGEST number of tanks: the battle of Kursk!

On a side note, battle of Kadesh had the biggest number of chariots.

Chariots = ancient tanks

Ancient tanks become WWII tanks

Both battles start with the letter "k"

CoinCIdence? I think not.

Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics.

Pardon my ignorance, but I'm curious with this. What was the significance of Church Dogmatics? I recall Barth was a big name, but I'm not really knowledgeable in his monumental work.