SMS Kaiser Karl der Grosse was a German pre-dreadnought battleship of the Kaiser Friedrich III class, built around the turn of the 20th century for the Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with four 24-centimeter guns in two twin gun turrets and had a top speed of 17. 5 knots. She served with the active fleet until 1908, participating in the normal peacetime routine of training cruises and fleet maneuvers. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the ship was placed back in active duty as a coastal defense ship in V Battle Squadron. She was briefly used as a training ship and ended her career as a prison ship for prisoners of war in Wilhelmshaven.
About SMS Kaiser Karl der Grosse in brief
SMS Kaiser Karl der Grosse was a German pre-dreadnought battleship of the Kaiser Friedrich III class, built around the turn of the 20th century for the Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with four 24-centimeter guns in two twin gun turrets and had a top speed of 17. 5 knots. She served with the active fleet until 1908, participating in the normal peacetime routine of training cruises and fleet maneuvers. At the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, the ship was placed back in active duty as a coastal defense ship in V Battle Squadron, though by February 1915 she was again placed in reserve. She was briefly used as a training ship and ended her career as a prison ship for prisoners of war in Wilhelmshaven. After the German defeat in November 1918, she was sold to ship-breakers and scrapped in 1920. Ship was the first capital ship to be built by the Blohm and Voss shipyard and the second warship of any type of warship to be named for the Emperor Charlemagne. It was the last member of her class to enter service; she was therefore the last of the class to be completed before the end of the First World War. She is the only ship of her type to have been built in Germany. She has been named after the Emperor Karl Der Grosse, who died in office in 1894.
The name Kaiser Karl Der Grosse was given to her by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who gave the launching speech and Johann Möncke, the Bürgermeister of Hamburg, the first German emperor to be born in 1868. She had a normal complement of 39 officers and 612 enlisted men. She displaced 11,097 t as designed and up to 11,785 t at full load. Her armament consisted of a main battery of four 24 cm SK L40 guns, one fore and one aft of the central superstructure, and six 45 cm torpedo tubes, all in above-water swivel mounts. The conning tower and main battery turrets were protected with 250 mm of armor plating, and the secondary casemates received 150 mm of armor protection. She was powered by three 3-cylinder vertical triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one screw propeller. Steam was provided by four Marine-type and eight cylindrical boilers, all of which burned coal, and she had a cruising radius of 3,420 nmi at a speed of 10 knots. The ship’s belt armor was 300 mm thick, and her main armor deck was 65 mm thick. It was the first of the four Brandenburg-class battleships built under a program of naval expansion in the late 1880s; the first battleships were built under the name Kaiser Friedrich III-class ships by the Kaiserliche Marine.
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