SMS was a protected cruiser of the , built for the German Imperial Navy () in the 1890s. was laid down at the AG Vulcan shipyard in 1895, launched in April 1897, and commissioned into the Navy in July 1898. The ship was armed with a battery of two 21 cm guns and eight 15 cm guns and had a top speed of .
served abroad in the East Asia Squadron for the first six years of her career; she served briefly as the Squadron flagship in 1900. She contributed a landing party to the force that captured the Taku Forts during the Boxer Uprising in 1900. After returning to Germany in 1905, she was modernized and used as a training ship in 1908, following the completion of the refit. She conducted a series of training cruises, and several notable officers served aboard the ship as cadets, including Karl Dönitz and Ernst Lindemann. At the outbreak of World War I, was mobilized into V Scouting Group, but served in front-line duty only briefly. She was used as a barracks ship after 1915, and ultimately sold for scrapping in 1920.
Design
In the early 1890s, elements in the German naval command structure grappled with what type of cruiser ought to be built to fulfill the various needs of the fleet. The (RMA—Imperial Navy Office) preferred to build a combination of large cruisers of around along the lines of and significantly smaller vessels of about to support them, while the (Naval High Command) argued that a uniform force of cruisers was preferable. In the event, the RMA carried the day and three 6,000-ton cruisers were authorized in 1895. They resembled the larger s, designed at the same time, albeit at reduced scale.
was long overall and had a beam of and a draft of forward. As designed, she displaced , and at full load, her displacement rose to . Her propulsion system consisted of three vertical 4-cylinder triple-expansion steam engines, each driving a single screw propeller, with steam provided by twelve coal-fired Belleville boilers. Her engines were rated for , and provided a top speed of . The ship had a range of approximately at . She had a crew of 31 officers and 446 enlisted men.
The ship was armed with a main battery of two SK L/40 guns in single gun turrets, one forward and one aft. The guns were supplied with 58 rounds of ammunition each. They had a range of . also carried a secondary battery of eight SK L/40 guns. Four were mounted in turrets amidships and the other four were placed in casemates, two abreast the conning tower and the others abreast the mainmast. These guns had a range of . She also carried ten SK L/35 guns for defense against torpedo boats. The gun armament was rounded out by ten Maxim machine cannon. She was also equipped with three torpedo tubes with eight torpedoes, two launchers were mounted on the broadside and the third was in the bow, all below the waterline.
The ship was protected with Krupp armor; their deck was on the horizontal with sloped sides that were thick. Her main and secondary battery turrets had 10 cm thick sides and the secondary casemates had the same level of protection. The conning tower had 15 cm thick sides.
Service history
Construction and initial service
, named after the earlier screw frigate , was ordered under the contract name "K" and was laid down at the AG Vulcan shipyard in Stettin in October 1895. She was launched on 14 April 1897, and Ludwig, the son of Luitpold, Prince Regent of Bavaria, christened the ship at the launching ceremony. The incomplete ship was then moved to the (Imperial Shipyard) in Kiel for fitting-out work, and while there, she was lightly rammed by the ironclad . Named for the earlier steam frigate , the ship was commissioned into the German navy on 23 July 1898 to begin sea trials. (Corvette Captain) Guido von Usedom was the ship's first commander. During her trials, her measured mile tests were filmed with Oskar Messter's black-and-white kinetoscope. The ship's initial testing revealed problems with her boilers, but she nevertheless was sent with the aviso to escort Kaiser Wilhelm II aboard his yacht on a voyage to the Mediterranean Sea.