HMS Furious was a modified Courageous-class battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy during the First World War. Furious was modified as an aircraft carrier while under construction. Her forward turret was removed and a flight deck was added in its place, such that aircraft had to manoeuvre around the superstructure to land. Furious spent most of 1943 training, but made a number of attacks on the German battleship Tirpitz and other targets in Norway during the first half of 1944. She was decommissioned in April 1945, but was not sold for scrap until 1948.
About HMS Furious (47) in brief
HMS Furious was a modified Courageous-class battlecruiser built for the Royal Navy during the First World War. Designed to support the Baltic Project championed by the First Sea Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Fisher, the ship was very lightly armoured and designed with a main battery of only two 18-inch guns. Furious was modified as an aircraft carrier while under construction. Her forward turret was removed and a flight deck was added in its place, such that aircraft had to manoeuvre around the superstructure to land. During the early months of the Second World War, the carrier spent her time hunting for German raiders in the North Atlantic and escorting convoys. Furious spent most of 1943 training, but made a number of attacks on the German battleship Tirpitz and other targets in Norway during the first half of 1944. She was decommissioned in April 1945, but was not sold for scrap until 1948. The ship was briefly laid up after the war before she was reconstructed with a full-length flight deck in the early 1920s. After her conversion, Furious was used extensively for trials of naval aircraft and later as a training carrier once the new armoured carriers like Ark Royal entered service in the late 1930s. Furious and her half-sisters were the first large warships in the RN to have geared steam turbines. The four Brown-Curtis turbines were powered by eighteen Yarrow small-tube boilers that were designed to produce a total of 90,000 shaft horsepower.
The ship’s speed was an estimated 31. 5 knots, but she never ran her sea trials. Furious had an overall length of 786 feet 9 inches, a beam of 88 feet, and a draught of 24 feet 11 inches at deep load. She displaced 19,513 long tons normally and 22,890 long tons at deep load, She had a metacentric height of 5. 33 feet atdeep load, and could carry a maximum of 3160 long tons of fuel oil. At full capacity, she could steam for an estimated 6,000 nautical miles at a speed of 20 knots. Her secondary armament consisted of two 18inch Mark I guns in two single turrets, one each fore and aft. A pair of quick-aircraft guns were also fitted with two submerged tubes for 21-inch torpedoes for which 10 torpedoes were carried. Even as she was being built, Furious had a large hangar capable of housing ten aircraft on her forecastle that replaced the forward turret. A 160-foot flight deck along its roof was built along its forecastle along with a second flight deck for the roof of the forecastle. She also had a pair ofquick-firing 3-inch 20-inch anti-air craft mounted before the funnel was built. Furious was the first ship in the Navy to be fitted with geared turbines to save time, the installation used in the light cruiser Champion, the first cruiser was copied and simply duplicated to provide two sets of turbines.
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