Single ship

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A single ship ( English : unique ship , or unique vessel or one-off ship ) is generally a single built ship without sister ships for civil or military use, which may also be the only one built in a ship class . Other watercraft that are not standard ships, such as catamarans , trimarans , hydrofoils , SWATHs or submarines or sub-cruisers , if built as a single copy, are also considered to be single ships.

description

A single ship is usually an individually built ship, after which no other sister ships of the same type or design follow. In the event that the individual ship is also the only one in the class , then it is both a type ship (also called a class ship or lead ship) and a series ship at the same time. However, only in a few cases did single ships establish a ship class that was named after them, so that a number of "unclassified" single ships existed and still are. In addition, only in very few exceptional cases did individual ships belong to a class not named after their own name, for example the great British battle cruiser HMS Hood from 1920, which was ultimately the only ship of the Admiral class to be completed. In general, it can be said that various individual ships often had particularly innovative features or even founded completely new types of ship .

In civil shipping, the large passenger ships were often single ships . There were also some individual merchant ships and cargo ships (including general cargo ships ), but mostly these were increasingly built in series in order to reduce construction costs and therefore remained rather rare with the exception of the large tankers , bulk carriers or container ships . However, there were also some single civilian ships, which were often built for special purposes. These were mostly work boats that did not serve the transportation such as icebreakers , lightships , pilot boats , fighting boats , tenders , supply ships , push boats , crane ships , hydraulic engineering vehicles / dredgers , drilling vessels , survey vessels , Peilschiffe , weather ships , air traffic control ships , salvage vessels , floating workshops and power ships . There were also factory ships , dock ships , cable layers , semi-submersible ships and other specialized types. A number of tugs , research vessels and multi-purpose vessels were also built as single vessels. Ship types deviating from the standard design were or are built as single ships, for example hydrofoils in the past and recently also SWATH double-hull ships. Particularly noteworthy as single ships for civil ocean-going shipping are the two nuclear ships Savannah from the USA in 1962 and Otto Hahn from what was then West Germany in 1969 (also research ship), which, as a special innovation, were the first merchant ships to have a nuclear power drive, which, however, was found in ships of the Ultimately, the merchant navy could not prevail.

In the military field, the construction of single ships was much more common, which is why most of the history were warships . The reasons for this were varied, mostly economic reasons played a role when a lack of financial resources or changed political or strategic framework conditions no longer allowed the construction of a complete class or no longer made sense. A good example of this was the 1946 Vanguard , the last British battleship to be completed and at the same time the single ship of the Vanguard class. Sometimes, for various reasons, the originally planned construction of all sister ships was canceled, so that in the end only a single ship of the class was built. Examples of this are the Soviet Flotilla Leader (Great Destroyer) Tashkent from 1939 , built in Italy , of the Tashkent class of the same name, and the aforementioned British battle cruiser Hood from 1920 of the Admiral class. A far more frequent reason to build a single warship was its experimental character in order to test a new type of ship or, if successful, to introduce it into the navy . A famous case was the first designed battleship in the world ever to monitor the Union States from the American Civil War of 1862, a then brand new warship type, along with the recently completed and used Virginia of the Confederate States because of their armor the naval war to get away from should revolutionize wooden sailing ships . The construction of a single ship was often a cheap solution, especially for smaller navies, to replace obsolete or lost combat ships. For example, in 1936 the light cruiser De Ruyter of the De Ruyter class of the same name was commissioned in the Netherlands as the largest unit of the Royal Navy and the new flagship of the fleet . What is striking, however, is the high number of aircraft carriers among the individual ships, far more than, for example, cruisers, which is not surprising in view of the size and the enormous construction costs involved. Another groundbreaking single ship was the first US nuclear powered aircraft carrier Enterprise from 1961, which preceded a long line of nuclear and conventionally powered aircraft carriers and other ships. This one of the most famous ships of its kind was designed from the beginning as a nuclear powered aircraft carrier. With this type of ship, however, there were also special cases in which ships that were not actually designed as aircraft carriers or that were not yet completed were completed as aircraft carriers. The most famous example of this was the Japanese Shinano from 1944 , which arose from the third super battleship of the same name of the Yamato class , which was still under construction . A few other individual aircraft carriers were subsequently converted from passenger or merchant ships , such as the Italian Aquila from 1943, which had emerged from the large passenger steamer Roma from 1941 , but could no longer be delivered in the end due to the political events in the first year. One of the last ships of this type to be built is also a single ship, the French Charles de Gaulle from 2001, which also has a nuclear drive. The Italian Cavour was put into service in 2009 as the currently last conventionally powered individual aircraft carrier . Another special feature are aircraft mother ships, which were almost always single ships. In the vast majority of cases, these emerged from the conversion of merchant ships or, less often, from outdated warships. The German catapult ship Ostmark was also a single ship.

In addition, several submarines and U-cruisers have been built as single ships for military shipping throughout history, especially when these were test models that were used to test new technologies. These include well-known names such as the large Italian deep-sea submarine RS Ettore Fieramosca from 1930 (basically already a submarine), the smaller Finnish submarine Vesikko from 1933 (was the prototype of the later first series of the German U Boats from World War II), the great Italian deep-sea submarine RS Pietro Micca from 1935, the US nuclear submarine USS Nautilus from 1954 and the French submarine Surcouf from 1934, which is also the largest ever built underwater vehicle in the world.

Well-known single ships (civil)

Passenger ship France
(France 1962)
Passenger ship Queen Elizabeth 2
(Great Britain 1969)
Steam icebreaker Stettin
(Germany 1933 - today museum ship)
Research ship and icebreaker Polarstern
(Germany 1982)
Research vessel Meteor
(Germany 1964)
Multipurpose ship Neuwerk
(Germany 1998)

Passenger ships

Cargo ships

  • Lexington (side paddle steamer, also passenger ship ) - USA 1835
  • Savannah - USA 1962 (no longer in service)
  • Otto Hahn (also research ship ) - Germany 1969 (no longer in operation)
  • Sevmorput (also icebreaker ) - Soviet Union / Russia 1988

tractor

Push boats

Icebreaker

Research vessels

Multipurpose vessels ( coast guard ship , buoy , tractors , Löschboot , icebreaker )

Well-known single ships (military)

Ship of the line HMS Agamemnon
(Great Britain 1852)
Ironclad (Monitor) USS Monitor
(US 1862)
Armored cruiser Dupuy de Lôme
(France 1890)
Armored battleship USS Maine (ACR-1)
(US 1895)
Protected cruiser Askold
(Russian Empire 1902)
Battleship HMS Dreadnought
(Britain 1906)
Small cruiser SMS Hela
(Germany 1907)
Large cruiser (armored cruiser) SMS Blücher
(Germany 1909)
La Foudre seaplane tender
(France 1913)
Battle cruiser HMS Hood
(Great Britain 1920)
Light cruiser Mr. Ms. De Ruyter
(Netherlands 1936)
Battleship HMS Vanguard
(Great Britain 1946)
Nuclear cruiser USS Long Beach (CGN-9)
(US 1961)
USS Enterprise (CVN 65) aircraft carrier
(US 1961)
Submarine Hunley
(Confederate States of America 1863)
USS Nautilus (SSN-571) submarine
(US 1954)

galley

Sail ships of the line

Steam powered floating battery

  • USS Fulton (also: Demologos , Fulton the First or US Steam Battery Fulton ) - USA 1816

Steam liners

Monitors

  • Monitor - USA 1862
  • Virginia (ex Merrimack screw frigate ) - United States (Confederate States) 1862

Armored ships

Steam-powered armored ships of the line

Battleships

Battle cruiser

cruiser

Protected cruisers

Small cruisers

Armored cruiser

Light cruisers

Heavy cruisers

Colonial cruiser

Nuclear cruiser

Flotilla Leader (Large Destroyer)

destroyer

Gunboats

Advices

tender

Workshop ships

  • Quarnaro - Italy 1927

Sail training ships

Aircraft carrier

Aircraft mother ships / seaplane carriers

Submarines

U-cruiser

See also