The class was a group of four light cruisers built for the German Imperial Navy. The class comprised four vessels: , the lead ship, , , and . The ships were an improvement on the preceding class, being slightly larger and faster, and mounting the same armament of ten 10.5 cm SK L/40 guns and two torpedo tubes.
The four ships saw extensive service during World War I. conducted commerce warfare in the Indian Ocean before being trapped in the Rufiji River and sunk by British warships. Her guns nevertheless continued to see action as converted artillery pieces for the German Army in German East Africa. was part of the East Asia Squadron, and participated in the Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands. At the former, she sank the British armored cruiser , and at the latter, she was in turn sunk by the cruiser .
and remained in German waters during the war, and both saw action at the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916. The two cruisers engaged in close-range night fighting with the British fleet, but neither was significantly damaged. Both ships were withdrawn from service later in the war, to serve as a training ship, and to be converted into a seaplane tender in 1918. They both survived the war, and were surrendered to Britain as war prizes; they were dismantled in the early 1920s.
Design
The 1898 Naval Law authorized the construction of thirty new light cruisers by 1904; the and es filled the requirements for the first seventeen vessels. The design followed the same general parameters as the two earlier classes, but with significant improvements in terms of size and speed. Like the s, one member of the class, , was fitted with steam turbines to evaluate their performance compared to traditional triple-expansion engines. The first vessel, , was authorized in 1904 and the remaining members of the class, , , and , were allocated to the 1905 fiscal year. Compared to the s, the s included an additional boiler to increase the top speed.
In December 1904, Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the state secretary of the (RMA—Imperial Navy Office) issued a report to Kaiser Wilhelm II advising him that before work began on the 1905 cruisers, the early battles of the Russo-Japanese War would be evaluated for lessons that could be incorporated into the new vessels. The need for enhanced protection against underwater weapons like naval mines had been aptly demonstrated in these early engagements, and so the German design staff made alterations to the design. The designers added an additional watertight bulkhead to both of the aft boiler rooms, increasing the number of watertight compartments from thirteen to fifteen, thereby reducing the risk of flooding disabling multiple boilers. This change necessitated a rearranging of the coal storage bunkers, so the three 1905 cruisers had to be lengthened by compared to the lead ship.
General characteristics
The ships of the class had slightly different characteristics. The lead ship was long at the waterline and long overall. She had a beam of and a draft of forward. The remaining three ships were long at the waterline and long overall; they had a beam of and a draft of forward. displaced as designed and up to at full load. and were designed to displace , with full load displacements of and , respectively. displaced as designed and at combat load.
The ships' hulls were constructed with transverse and longitudinal steel frames, over which the steel outer hull was built. The hulls were divided into thirteen or fourteen watertight compartments. A double bottom ran for forty-seven percent of the length of the keel. Steering was controlled by a single rudder. The ships of the class were good sea boats, but they were crank and rolled up to twenty degrees. They were also very wet at high speeds and suffered from a slight weather helm; in the case of she suffered from quite severe weather helm. The ships' metacentric height was . The ships had a crew of fourteen officers and 308 enlisted men. They carried a number of smaller boats, including one picket boat, one barge, one cutter, two yawls, and two dinghies.