Arcona class
SMS Arcona , the type ship of the class
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
.svg){kind=small}
The Arcona class was a class of five covered corvettes built for the Prussian Navy in the late 1860s and 1870s . The ships were SMS Arcona , SMS Gazelle , SMS Vineta , SMS Hertha and SMS Elisabeth . The naming of the ships did not follow any particular pattern.
The corvettes of the class were commissioned in the course of the reconstruction of the Prussian Navy and were to do service in the regular fleet service as well as later on extended mission trips in overseas areas of interest of Prussia and the German Empire . The main armament consisted of a battery of 28 68 pounder guns. The ships were considered modern steam corvettes and had full sailing equipment to supplement the steam engine on long mission trips overseas.
In 1884 the ships of the class were deleted from the ship register, only the Elisabeth remained in active fleet service until 1887.
history
The Arcona class was the first class of larger warships built in Prussia since the times of the Kurbrandenburg Navy . All ships of the class were built at the Royal Shipyard in Danzig in three lots with slightly different dimensions. Here were Arcona and Gazelle the first Vineta and Herta second and Elisabeth the last construction lot. The Thetis sailing frigate , which Prussia had acquired from England in 1855 , was used as a model for the basic design . It was also the first class of ships built in a German state to be equipped with steam engines.
The reason for procuring the ships was that as early as the late 1850s, Prussian trade interests were expanding in the overseas markets in Asia, Central and South America and the Pacific, where they clashed with the interests of other European powers that Prussian companies were doing overseas Excluded areas of interest. Accordingly, the naval command decided to equip the ships of the Arcona class not only with the technical innovation of steam power but also with traditional sailing systems with a correspondingly large radius of action, as so-called stationary ones to protect Prussian and German interests and to further power projection , often in the sense of a gunboat policy . deployed at marine stations established overseas .
Logically, the type ship Arcona was initially used in foreign service after its commissioning in 1859 and took part in the Prussian East Asia expedition. The Gazelle also served in this function from 1862. In the German-Danish War , only Arcona and the not yet fully operational Vineta actively participated in the fighting. The Arcona served as the flagship of Captain Eduard von Jachmann in the naval battle near Jasmund . In 1868 the Vineta was the first warship in the Prussian Navy to sail around the world . At the German war and the Franco-German War , none of the vessels actively involved. In the 1870s, the ships continued to be used as stationary abroad, particularly in the Caribbean, the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
As early as 1869, the Arcona was used as a training ship for midshipmen and, in this role, completed a circumnavigation in 1873. The Gazelle also made a circumnavigation of the world from June 1874 to April 1876. However, this was done for research purposes, among other things, to observe the Venus transit of 1874 on the Kerguelen .
By the middle of the 1870s, the ships of the first two construction lots were also withdrawn from service at the front and used as training ships. All these ships were removed from the fleet lists in 1884 and later sold for scrapping. Only the Elisabeth remained in active naval service until 1887, carried out numerous flag hoisting in later German colonies in Africa and Oceania and was part of the cruiser squadron of the Imperial Navy . From 1887 it was used as a Hulk and was only broken up in Stettin in 1904 .
general characteristics
The Arcona and Gazelle were 63.55 m long at the waterline and 71.95 m long, with a width of 13 m and a maximum draft of 6.35 m. The design displacement was 1928 t, with a full load the ships displaced up to 2391 t.
The ships of the second construction lot were slightly longer at 65.50 m at the waterline and 73.32 m above all . The width was 12.9 m and the maximum draft 6.53 m. With a design displacement of 2113 t and a maximum load of 2504 t, these ships were also heavier than those of the first construction lot.
The Elisabeth , as the ship of the third construction lot, was 71.5 m long at the waterline and 79.35 m long, with a width of 13.2 m and a maximum draft of 6.40 m. It was the largest ship in the class. The design displacement was 2454 t, with a full load the ship displaced up to 2912 t.
The hulls of all ships were a wooden structure with transverse ribs and Kraweel planking , which was covered with copper plates to prevent biocorrosion during longer missions overseas, where shipyard facilities were not readily available.
The ship's crew consisted of 380 men. All ships had a number of dinghies of unspecified types.
drive
The Arcona-class ships were propelled by a horizontal 2-cylinder steam engine using a 2-blade screw propeller with a diameter of 4.8 m. The steam engines were procured in England and had slightly different performance values from ship to ship, ranging from 1320 hp ( Gazelle ) to 1580 hp ( Vineta ). The Elisabeth had with 2440 hp more power than its sister ships. Steam was provided by four coal-fired boilers on all ships . The exhaust gases were directed amidships into a single retractable chimney . In addition to the independence from the wind, the steam engine also gave the ships independence from a drinking water supply on land thanks to a steam-operated still. The ships were also equipped with a full-rigged ship - rig equipped with a uniform 2,200 m² sail area.
The ships had a planned speed of 12 knots (22 km / h), only the ships in the second batch were slightly slower at 11.7 knots.
Armament
At the time of completion, the main armament at Arcona , Vineta and Hertha consisted of 28 68-pounder cannons. Gazelle and Elisabeth had a different main armament of six 68-pounder and twenty 36-pounder cannons. All of these cannons were muzzle-loaders . From 1870 these weapons were replaced by seventeen 15 cm ring cannons (Rk) of caliber length L / 22 and two 12.5 cm Rk L / 23. These were more modern breech loaders . The 15 cm cannons had a range of 5,000 m.
Ships
| ship | shipyard | Launch | Commissioning | Removal from the ship register | Whereabouts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SMS Arcona | Royal Shipyard Gdansk , Gdansk | May 19, 1858 | April 15, 1859 | March 18, 1884 | Wrecked in 1884 |
| SMS Gazelle | December 19, 1859 | May 15, 1862 | 1884 | Broken down in 1906 | |
| SMS Vineta | June 4, 1863 | March 3, 1864 | 1884 | Wrecked in 1897 | |
| SMS Hertha | October 1, 1864 | November 1, 1865 | 1884 | Broken down in 1902 | |
| SMS Elisabeth | October 10, 1868 | September 29, 1869 | September 20, 1887 | Broken down in 1904 |
literature
- Hildebrand, Hans H. / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . 10 volumes. Mundus Verlag, Ratingen (licensed edition by Koehler's Verlagsgesellschaft, Hamburg, approx. 1990).