SMS Roon was the lead ship of her class of armored cruisers built for the German Kaiserliche Marine in the early 1900s. The ship was armed with a main battery of four 21 cm guns and had a top speed of 20. 4 knots. Roon served in I Scouting Group, the reconnaissance force of the High Seas Fleet, for the duration of her peacetime career. She was mobilized in August 1914 following the outbreak of World War I and assigned to III Scouting Group in the North Sea.
About SMS Roon in brief
SMS Roon was the lead ship of her class of armored cruisers built for the German Kaiserliche Marine in the early 1900s. The ship was armed with a main battery of four 21 cm guns and had a top speed of 20. 4 knots. Roon served in I Scouting Group, the reconnaissance force of the High Seas Fleet, for the duration of her peacetime career, including several stints as the flagship of the group’s deputy commander. In September 1911 she was decommissioned and placed in reserve. She was mobilized in August 1914 following the outbreak of World War I and assigned to III Scouting Group in the North Sea. The threat of British submarines convinced the German command to withdraw old vessels like Roon by early 1916, and she was later used as a training ship. Plans to convert her into a seaplane tender in 1918 came to nothing with the end of the war, and the ship was broken up in 1921. The two Roon-class cruisers were ordered in 1902 as part of the fleet expansion program specified by the Second Naval Law of 1900. The ships were incremental developments of the preceding Prinz Adalbert- class cruisers, the most significant difference being a longer hull; the extra space was used to add a pair of boilers, which increased power by 2,028 metric horsepower and speed by 0. 5 knots. The launch of the British battlecruiser HMS Invincible in 1907 quickly rendered all of the armored cruiser that had been built by the world’s navies obsolescent.
She displaced 9,533 metric tons as built and 10,266 t fully loaded, with steam provided by sixteen coal-fired water-tube boilers. She also had four 45cm torpedo tubes underwater, one in the bow, one on each broadside, and one on the stern, one in the stern. Her deck was 4–6cm thick, connected to the lower edge of the main belt by 4–5cm sloped armor. Her hull was protected with Krupp cemented amidships and was reduced to 8 cm thick on either end of the battery turrets. Her keel was laid down in August 1902, launched in June 1903, and commissioned in April 1906. In 1907, she visited the U.S. to represent Germany during the Jamestown Exposition. She saw no action during either operation, though she was transferred to the Baltic Sea in April 1915 and took part in several operations against Russian forces, including the successful attack on Libau in May and the failed attack on Riga in August. She had a crew of 35 officers and 598 enlisted men, and a draft of 7. 76 m forward, and was propelled by three vertical triple expansion engines, each driving a screw propeller, withSteam provided by 16 coal- fired water- tube boilers and yielded a maximum speed of 21. 1 knots on trials, falling short of her intended speed of 22 knots.
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This page is based on the article SMS Roon published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
