SMS was one of four battleships in the , the first dreadnoughts built for the German Imperial Navy (). The ship was laid down at the Germaniawerft shipyard in Kiel on 11 June 1907, launched on 12 December 1908, and commissioned into the High Seas Fleet on 31 May 1910. She was equipped with a main battery of twelve guns in six twin turrets in an unusual hexagonal arrangement.
The ship served with her three sister ships for the majority of World War I. She saw extensive service in the North Sea, where she took part in several fleet sorties. These culminated in the Battle of Jutland on 31 May – 1 June 1916, where was heavily engaged in night-fighting against British light forces. In the confusion, the ship accidentally rammed the light cruiser , which suffered serious damage and was scuttled later in the night.
The ship also conducted several deployments to the Baltic Sea against the Russian Navy. In the first of these, supported a German naval assault in the Battle of the Gulf of Riga. The ship was sent back to the Baltic in 1918 to support the White Finns in the Finnish Civil War. At the end of the war, remained in Germany while the majority of the fleet was interned in Scapa Flow. In 1919, following the scuttling of the German fleet in Scapa Flow, she was ceded to the British as a replacement for the ships that had been sunk. She was then sent to ship-breakers in the Netherlands and scrapped in 1922.
Description
Design work on the class began in late 1903 in the context of the Anglo-German naval arms race; at the time, battleships of foreign navies had begun to carry increasingly heavy secondary batteries, including Italian and American ships with guns and British ships with guns, outclassing the previous German battleships of the with their secondaries. German designers initially considered ships equipped with secondary guns, but erroneous reports in early 1904 that the British s would be equipped with a secondary battery of guns prompted them to consider an even more powerful ship armed with an all-big-gun armament consisting of eight guns. Over the next two years, the design was refined into a larger vessel with twelve of the guns, by which time Britain had launched the all-big-gun battleship .
was long, wide, and had a draft of . She displaced with a standard load, and fully laden. The ship had a crew of 40 officers and 968 enlisted men. retained three-shafted triple expansion engines with twelve coal-fired water-tube boilers instead of more advanced turbine engines. Her propulsion system was rated at and provided a top speed of . She had a cruising radius of at a speed of . This type of machinery was chosen at the request of both Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz and the Navy's construction department; the latter stated in 1905 that the "use of turbines in heavy warships does not recommend itself." This decision was based solely on cost: at the time, Parsons held a monopoly on steam turbines and required a 1 million gold mark royalty fee for every turbine engine. German firms were not ready to begin production of turbines on a large scale until 1910.
carried a main battery of twelve SK L/45 guns in an unusual hexagonal configuration. Her secondary armament consisted of twelve SK L/45 guns and sixteen SK L/45 guns, all of which were mounted in casemates. Later in her career, two of the 8.8 cm guns were replaced with high-angle Flak mountings of the same caliber for defense against aircraft. The ship was also armed with six submerged torpedo tubes. One tube was mounted in the bow, another in the stern, and two on each broadside, on either ends of the torpedo bulkhead. The ship's belt armor was thick in the central citadel, and the armored deck was thick. The main battery turrets had thick sides, and the conning tower was protected with of armor plating.