Alfonso XII-class cruiser
1887 class of Spanish cruisers
The Alfonso XII class of unprotected cruisers was a series of three ships built during the 1880s for service with the Spanish Navy. They were named for a Spanish king and two Spanish queens.
Description
The Alfonso XII class had three masts and two funnels. They were unarmored, but their hulls were built with a French-style cellular system with 12 watertight bulkheads. The Ferrol-built ships were the first two steel-hulled cruisers built in that yard. The main guns were built by Hontoria and mounted in sponsons. The torpedo tubes were fixed; one was on each beam, two were forward, and one was aft. The class took a long time to complete; the lead unit was delayed for five years by material shortages and took ten years from keel-laying to commissioning.
The ships were designed for colonial service, and were not intended to fight the armored and heavily armed ships they would meet in the Spanish–American War. They were plagued by machinery and boiler problems, and proved to be much slower steamers than their designers had intended.
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This entry incorporates text from “Alfonso XII-class cruiser” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.