/jp/ - Otaku Culture

>>36401277
Cruiser type warships originally started to appear in 17th&18th century as affordable small to medium sized warships capable of operating for long periods of time on its own and used for duties as such commerce raiding&protection, independent scouting, and stationed at distant stations that didn't need full scale ship of the line. Of course to counter these some people built heavy/super-frigates such as USS Constitution which is something of a trend when it comes to cruisers; most of the time people will try to counter them by building bigger&more heavily armed cruisers.

Fast forward little bit; it is mid-19th century, people have figure out that you can armor your ships with iron and put steam engines aboard of them to make them capable of moving around without having to rely on sails or oars, around this time you have some attempts to build armored cruising warships but they all kinda sucked and the concept really didn't took off until Russian General-Admiral entered service which was armored&armed on scale of 2nd rate ironclad and was meant for (at least in theory, the tech wasn't quite there yet) to be used a commerce raider, which caused brits to build HMS Shannon and era of armored cruisers started with these 2 classes of ship. Around same time advances in shell technology make having unarmored warships for cruising role obsolete and while powerful armored cruisers are just too expensive to be really used for the role of small cruising type warships, this leads to Armstrong building Esmeralda for Chiliean navy; a cruiser that didn't have belt armor just a slopped deck to protect it vitals, people also kinda liked this concept and thus shitload of protected cruisers were built during last couple decades 19th and first decade 20th century.

Anyway it is 20th century now, cruisers are generally split to 2 categories: big armored cruisers with 8 to 10 inch guns which kinda function as 2nd rate battleships (and used with great success at that role by Japanese during the Battle of Tsushima) with some commence raiding capabilities and smaller protected cruisers. However a certain mad lad in Britain is about to fuck things up; enter the 1st Sea Lord John "Jackie" Fisher, outside of his little battleship called Dreadnought that would render every other battleship obsolete Jackie boy also wanted to mess around armored cruisers and thus decided to up their speed and arm them with bigger guns: this led to creation of Invincible-class of dreadnought cruiser or battlecruiser, when compared to Minotaurs, the last class of British armored cruisers, Invincibles were 2 knots faster, featured significantly heavier main battery of 8 12" guns compared to Minotaurs' 4 9.2" guns, and displaced only 3000 tons more mostly because they were armored on same scale as minotaurs. This move basically forced every one else (noticeable exception being USN due to congress having bad cruiser allergy during this time period) to abandon armored cruiser concept and start building their own battlecruisers. Japanese ones shared more or less same balance of speed&armor&firepower as the British ones (i.e. high speed, having 1 or 2 turrets less than battleships, and mediocre armor) meanwhile the German ones tended to be slower to but put more emphasis on survivability&armor. Around same time protected cruisers also become obsolete as the advancements in propulsion tech have finally made it possible to mount both armored belt&engines suitable for high speeds at relatively small hull sizes which led to protected cruisers being replaced by light cruisers which took over their roles of scouting, commerce warfare, and escort duties.

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