SMS Prince Adalbert (1864)
.svg){kind=small}
|
|
|---|---|
|
|
| Overview | |
| Type | Aries ship |
| Shipyard |
L'Arman Frères, Bordeaux |
| Order | 1862 |
| Keel laying | 1863 |
| Launch | 1864 |
| delivery | July 10, 1865 |
| Commissioning | October 29, 1865 |
| Decommissioning | October 23, 1871 |
| Removed from ship register | May 28, 1878 |
| Whereabouts | Demolished in 1878 |
| Technical specifications | |
| displacement |
Construction: 1440 t, |
| length |
KWL : 50.48 m |
| width |
9.92 m |
| Draft |
4.94 - 5.02 m |
| crew |
10 officers and 120 men |
| drive |
|
| speed |
9.5 kn |
| Range |
1200 nm at 8 kn |
| Armament | |
| Rigging |
Brigg |
| Sail area |
740 m² |
| Volume |
779 GRT |
| stock |
96 tons of coal |
| Armor |
Material: wrought iron |
SMS Prinz Adalbert , originally under the name of Cheops built was after Arminius the second armored ram ship the Prussian Navy .
Building history
The ship was one of two speculative building after a design by 1862, the shipyard L'Arman Freres in Bordeaux were built there in the assumption that in the American Civil War located Confederate Southern would buy them. In order to conceal this and to prevent international entanglements, the two ships were stacked under the cover names Sphinx and Cheops and issued as Egyptian orders.
Construction of the Cheops began in 1863, and the ship was launched on 25 October 1864 from the stack . The French Emperor Napoléon III. banned delivery to the Confederation in February 1864, and the shipyard sold the unfinished ship to the Prussian Navy. It was delivered on July 10, 1865 and put into service on October 29, 1866. The ship was named after Prince Adalbert of Prussia (1811–1873), the founder and first commander in chief of the Prussian and later the Imperial Navy .
The sister ship, built under the cover name Sphinx , was delivered to the Confederation via Denmark , but reached America too late to intervene in the war. The US government sold the ship, renamed Stonewall by the southern states, to Japan in 1869 , where it served in the fleet under the name Kōtetsu and from 1871 under the name Azuma until 1888.
Technical specifications
The ship was a transverse frame - iron - wood - copper - composite construction and was designed as a pile driver. It was 57 m long because of its unusually long ram . The width was 9.9 m, the draft 5 m, and the water displacement was 1,560 tons . The drive of the brig - rigged ship consisted of two horizontal two-cylinder single expansion steam engines from Mazeline with 600 PSi each , which acted on two screws . The maximum speed was around 10 kn . The crew numbered 130 men, including ten officers.
Armament originally consisted of three 36-pounders with smooth running , one in a pentagonal, armored turret on the bow , the other two in an octagonal tower on the stern . In the summer of 1866 these were replaced by Krupp quick-loading guns with rifled barrel, a 21-cm L / 19 quick-loading cannon in the front and two 17-cm L / 25 quick-loading cannons aft.
The Prinz Adalbert had only a small freeboard , took a lot of water overboard in rough seas and rolled strongly, and was considered a ship with very poor sea characteristics, unsuccessful and poorly assembled. The armor was only properly attached afterwards, the main mast had to be relocated , and bulwarks were placed on the stem as a breakwater . In addition , the ship leaked very badly. Prince Adalbert, the namesake, mockingly referred to it as "the lame cousin". However, the ship was relatively manoeuvrable, which was a necessity due to the intended use of the ram.
career
During the Franco-German War in 1870/71, the ship served to secure the mouth of the Elbe .
Since the wooden hull soon began to rot, the Prinz Adalbert had to be decommissioned on October 23, 1871. On May 28, 1875, she was finally deleted from the list of warships and scrapped in Wilhelmshaven in 1878 . The name "Prinz Adalbert" was transferred on September 1, 1878 to the cruiser frigate launched as Sedan on May 17, 1876 in Stettin .
literature
- Erich Gröner, The German Warships 1815–1945. Volume 1: Armored ships, ships of the line, battleships, aircraft carriers, cruisers, gunboats. Bernard & Graefe Verlag, 1998, ISBN 3-7637-4800-8
- Serge Noirsain, La flotte européenne de la Confederation sudiste Confederate Historical Association of Belgium, 2000, without ISBN (French)