The Francesco Caracciolo-class battleships were designed for the Regia Marina in 1913. Armed with a main battery of eight 381 mm guns and possessing a top speed of 28 knots, the four ships were intended to be the equivalent of the British Queen Elizabeth class. The class was never completed due to material shortages and shifting construction priorities after the outbreak of World War I.
About Francesco Caracciolo-class battleship in brief
The Francesco Caracciolo-class battleships were a group of four battleships designed for the Regia Marina in 1913 and ordered in 1914. Armed with a main battery of eight 381 mm guns and possessing a top speed of 28 knots, the four ships were intended to be the equivalent of the fast battleships like the British Queen Elizabeth class. The class was never completed due to material shortages and shifting construction priorities after the outbreak of World War I. Only the lead ship was launched in 1920, and several proposals to convert her into an aircraft carrier were considered, but budgetary problems prevented any work being done. She was sold to an Italian shipping firm for conversion into a merchant ship, but this also proved to be too expensive, and she was broken up for scrap beginning in 1926.
Around 9,000 steel had been built into the hull for the ships, but only 5percent of the hull and machinery had been assembled by the end of the First World War. The lead ship Cristoforo Colombo was the furthest along, along with the next three ships, Marcantonio Colonna, and Francesco Morosini. The first ship of the class was laid down in late-1914; the other three ships followed in 1915. The ships would have displaced 31,400 metric tons at normal loading and up to 34,000 t at full load. They would have been powered by four Parsons steam turbines, each driving one shaft, using steam provided by twenty oil-fired Yarrow boilers. The guns fired 885-kilogram projectiles at a muzzle velocity of 700 meters per second to a range of 19,800 meters.
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This page is based on the article Francesco Caracciolo-class battleship published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 08, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
