SMS Preussen was the fourth of five pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28-cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. Preussen served as the flagship of II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet for the majority of her career. She participated in a fleet sortie in December 1914 in support of the Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby during which the German fleet briefly clashed with a detachment of the British Grand Fleet.
About SMS Preussen (1903) in brief
SMS Preussen was the fourth of five pre-dreadnought battleships built for the German Kaiserliche Marine. The ship was armed with a battery of four 28-cm guns and had a top speed of 18 knots. Preussen served as the flagship of II Battle Squadron of the High Seas Fleet for the majority of her career. She participated in a fleet sortie in December 1914 in support of the Raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby during which the German fleet briefly clashed with a detachment of the British Grand Fleet. She was stricken from the naval register in April 1929 and sold to ship breakers in 1931. A 63-meter section of her hull was retained as a target; it was bombed and sunk in 1945 by Allied bombers at the end of World War II, and was scrapped in 1954. After the war, she was retained by the re-formed Reichsmarine and converted into a depot ship for F-type minesweepers. Her name was changed to MS Preussen in honor of the German state of Prussia in the early 20th century. She is now a museum ship at the Museum of Naval History and Science in Düsseldorf, Germany. She has been named after the Prussian city of Preussen, where she was originally built in 1903 and was named for the state of the same name. The name Preussen means “preussen” in German, meaning “precious” or “princess” in English, and is a reference to the Prussia-era name for the city of Prussen, which was once the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia.
She had a crew of 35 officers and 708 enlisted men and was powered by three 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion engines that drove three screws. She could steam 5,200 nautical miles at a cruising speed of 10 knots. Her armored belt was 110 to 250 millimeters thick, with heavier armor in the central portion that protected her propulsion machinery and the central magazines and magazines. The main battery had four 28 cm SK L40 guns and eighteen in, one fore and one aft of the central superstructure. The armament suite was rounded out with six 45-cm torpedo tubes, all submerged in the hull, two on each broadside, and the final tube was in the stern. She served as a guard ship in the German Bight and later in the Danish straits during World War I. She did not rejoin the fleet, and instead continued to serve as aguard ship until 1917, when she became a tender for U-boats based in Wilhelmshaven. The British battleship HMS Dreadnoughts was commissioned in December 1906, less than a year and a half after Preussen entered service. The Dreadnought’s revolutionary design rendered every capital ship of theGerman navy obsolete, including Preussen. The Braunschweig class marked a significant improvement over earlier German battleships, but its design fell victim to the rapid pace of technological development in early 1900s.
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