Sone info about the old ironclad from WIKI:
"Inflexible was launched 27 April 1876. Later that year the MP Edward Reed, formerly Director of Naval Construction, visited the Italian ships and subsequently questioned their stability if the unarmoured ends were flooded.
As Inflexible was of similar design, he raised grave concerns about it too. When he failed to persuade the Admiralty, in June 1877 he publicised his charges in The Times. An editorial in the same edition, 18 June, said "it is said that the unarmoured ends are, in fact, the corks on which she floats, that she cannot swim without them, and it would appear that if she lost one she would capsize".[4]
Further exchanges followed until in July, construction was halted on Inflexible (and two other smaller ships, HMS Ajax and HMS Agamemnon) whilst a hastily convened committee examined the design. In their report published in December 1877, they concluded that it would be hard for gunfire to completely flood the unarmoured but heavily compartmentalised and partially cork-filled ends. However, if this was managed then the ship would just be stable, capsizing at about 35 degrees heel.[4]
Work restarted on the ship in December 1877, and the ship was commissioned 5 July 1881, under Captain John Fisher, although she was not completed until 18 October. Her eventual cost was £812,000.
Main armament
To counter the perceived threat from the Italians, Inflexible was to be equipped with four of the largest guns available, weighing 60 tons each. In October 1874
it was decided to modify the design of Inflexible to use an even bigger gun which Armstrongs was producing, a 16-inch (406 mm) gun weighing 81 tons. The Italians responded by changing their design to take even larger 100-ton 17.7-inch (450 mm) Armstrongs guns.[4] As these could not be fitted to Inflexible, four examples were ordered by the British Government, two each for the coastal defences around Gibraltar and Malta respectively. Two of these guns still exist, at Fort Rinnella on Malta and at the Napier of Magdala Battery on Gibraltar.
The four 81-ton muzzle-loading rifles were mounted in two 33-foot-10-inch-diameter (10.31 m) turrets mounted en echelon, with the forward turret mounted on the port side of the ship and the after turret on the starboard side. The superstructure both fore and aft was very narrow to allow one gun in each turret to fire axially, i.e. directly forward or directly aft. In practice, as in previous ships, it was found that axial fire led to so much blast damage to the ship's superstructure that it was impractical. However, the en-echelon arrangement also meant that at least three guns could fire on bearings close to fore and aft. All four guns could be fired broadside.
The en-echelon configuration was retained for the two ships of the Colossus class, but subsequently abandoned in the Royal Navy in favour of centreline mounts at either end of the ship. The en-echelon configuration did not reappear in Royal Navy capital ships until HMS Neptune launched in 1909.
Each turret weighed 750 tons and was protected by an outer layer of 9 inches (230 mm) of compound armour, an inner layer of 7-inch-thick (180 mm) wrought iron, with a total of 18 inches (460 mm) of teak backing. The turrets were rotated hydraulically, taking around a minute to perform a complete rotation.
Inflexible's guns were muzzle loaded, and because of their length could not be reloaded from inside the turrets. Consequently reloading was done using hydraulic rams fitted outside the two turrets underneath an armoured glacis. To reload the guns, the turret was rotated to align the guns with the rams, and the guns depressed so that the rams could push the gunpowder charge and 1,684-pound shell into it. The rams had to be extended twice: First, to extinguish any burning material remaining inside the gun using a sponge and water jet fixed to the end of the ram, and then again after charge, shell and wadding had been placed on a loading tray in front of it to be driven into the gun. The shell had a copper disk at its base which engaged with rifled grooves cut into the barrel to spin the shell, rather than zinc studs used on earlier designs. Tests showed that the normal full charge of 450 pounds of brown prismatic gunpowder would produce a muzzle velocity of 1,590 feet per second (480 m/s), which could penetrate 23 inches (580 mm) of wrought iron armour at 1,000 yards (910 m). The muzzle loading took between 2.5 and four minutes.
On completion the ship was sent to join the Mediterranean squadron. She took part in the bombardment of Alexandria on 11 July 1882 during the Urabi Revolt, firing 88 shells and was struck herself twice; one 10-inch (254mm) shell killed the ship's carpenter, mortally wounded an officer directing the fire of a 20-pounder breech-loader, and injured a seaman. The blast from Inflexible's own 16-inch (406 mm) guns did considerable damage to upperworks and boats. She was at this point under command of Captain (later Admiral of the Fleet) John Arbuthnot Fisher.
She was refitted in Portsmouth in 1885, when the full sailing rig was removed. She was in the Fleet Reserve until 1890, except for brief service in the 1887 review and the manoeuvres of 1889 and 1890. She was re-commissioned for the Mediterranean Fleet from 1890 to 1893, serving thereafter as Portsmouth guard ship until 1897. From there she went to Fleet Reserve, and in April 1902 to Dockyard Reserve, until sold at Chatham in 1903 for scrap."
DFO