SMS Comet (1892)
 The sister ship Meteor
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The SMS Comet was the second of the Meteor class , a class of two Avisos of the Imperial Navy . From 1899 both ships were classified as small cruisers .
construction
After the Aviso F was launched in January 1890 , construction of its sister ship was delayed until the first test drive results of the type ship were available. It was not until November 1891, six months after the Meteor was put into service , that the keel for the Aviso G was laid at the Stettiner Werft AG Vulcan . For this second construction of the Meteor class, the construction plans were slightly modified according to the test drive results of the type ship. The shape of the underwater hull was changed and the maximum draft was reduced by over a meter. Furthermore, the width of the ship and the length of the waterline changed slightly, the construction displacement increased by 31 t. In addition, the two funnels were given a greater height, as it had been shown on the Meteor that they were originally too low and the aft gun operations were hindered by smoke gases.
The Aviso was ready for launch on November 15, 1892. The christening in the name Comet was carried out by the chief shipyard director of the Kaiserliche Werft Kiel , sea captain Otto von Diederichs . After completion of the acceptance test drives on April 14, 1893, the ship was moved to Kiel.
Working time
The Comet was first put into service on April 29, 1893 in Kiel to carry out further test drives. After its completion on July 6, the ship was decommissioned. In the following year, Comet was only activated briefly, from June 5 to June 30, 1894. In 1895 there was no use at all, instead various changes were made to the ship. Because of this, test drives were again carried out in the North Sea from January 22 to April 26, 1896. As early as May 2, 1896, the Comet in Wilhelmshaven was decommissioned and transferred to the reserve. In 1897, the ship was finally moved back to Kiel without officially putting it into service.
Whereabouts
Although the Comet was only a few years old, it was not used again, probably due to its poor seaworthiness. In 1901 she was towed to Gdansk with three other warships and listed as a port ship there from May 3, 1905. On June 24, 1911, it was deleted from the list of warships. The hull of the Comet was finally towed to Emden in June 1914 and used there as a mining hulk for the SMS Arcona . In 1921 it was scrapped in Hamburg.
The small cruiser SMS Dresden , launched in 1907, was built to replace the Comet .
Commanders
| April 29 to July 6, 1893 | unknown |
| June 5-30, 1894 | Corvette Captain Henning von Holtzendorff |
| January 22 to May 2, 1896 | Lieutenant Ludwig Bruch |
literature
- Gröner, Erich / Dieter Jung / Martin Maass: The German warships 1815-1945 . tape 1 : Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats . Bernard & Graefe Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8 , p. 123 .
- Hildebrand, Hans H. / Albert Röhr / Hans-Otto Steinmetz: The German warships . Biographies - a mirror of naval history from 1815 to the present . tape 2 : Ship biographies from Baden to Eber . Mundus Verlag, Ratingen, S. 187 f .