Explosive vessel Revel
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
_crowned.svg){kind=small}
The explosive vessel Revel (also Tanks marini ), named after the inventor Paolo Thaon di Revel , was the prototype of an explosive vessel for the Royal Italian Navy , which was commissioned by the Italian Naval Office in 1916 to increase the effectiveness of small and faster operating small combat units against larger naval units to test in World War I.
Development history
In the spring of 1916, considerations by the Italian naval command led to attacking and destroying the larger battleships of the Austrian Navy with new types of small arms, without starting major naval battles . As a first step, the warships of the Austro-Hungarian Navy in the port of Pola were to be attacked from Venice . Since the enemy ships were protected against attacks by mine, net and beam locks, the Italian naval command turned to Admiral di Revel with the request to design a device that was able to overcome beam locks and then the ships using torpedoes to attack. The use of torpedoes instead of the later conventional explosive charge in the bow was necessary because at that time no suitable engines were available that would have made high attack speeds possible.
The planning phase and start of construction of the prototype in June 1916 were subject to such secret security measures that little information has been obtained. For a reason that cannot be verified, the originally planned electric motor with 40 HP main power was replaced by a much weaker 10 HP motor. This worked relatively noiselessly, but had the disadvantage that the explosive boat almost crept over the water. The naval management was so disappointed with the first test drives that they withdrew the prototype after the tests for other tasks, not least because of the fact that the speedboats of the Italian Navy (type MTS) used to date are much more efficient and their engines have higher performance were quieter.
The project was abandoned. However, its key design data were used in the royal navy's climbing boat built in 1917 .
Footnotes
- ↑ Harald Fock: Naval small weapons. Manned torpedoes, small submarines, small speedboats, explosives yesterday - today - tomorrow. Nikol, Hamburg 1996, ISBN 3-930656-34-5 , p. 106.