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HMS ''Canopus'' was a pre-dreadnought battleship of the British Royal Navy and the lead ship of the ''Canopus'' class. At the beginning of the First World War she was involved in the search for the German East Asia Squadron of Admiral Graf Spee. Too slow to follow Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock's cruisers, she missed the Battle of Coronel, but fired the first shots of the Battle of the Falklands. Transferred to the Mediterranean she took part in the Naval operations in the Dardanelles Campaign. ==Technical description== HMS ''Canopus'' was laid down at Portsmouth Dockyard on 4 January 1897, launched on 12 October 1897, and completed on 5 December 1899.〔Burt, p. 141〕 She was named after the ancient city of Canopus, Egypt, where the Battle of the Nile took place.〔Paine, pp. 29–30. In that battle one of the prizes taken by Lord Nelson's fleet was the French ship ''Franklin'', renamed by the British to HMS ''Canopus''.〕 ''Canopus'' and her five sister ships were designed for service in the Far East, where the new rising power Japan was beginning to build a powerful and dangerous navy. These vessels were intended to be able to transit the Suez Canal. They were designed to be smaller (by about 2,000 tons), lighter and faster than their predecessors, the ''Majestic''-class battleships, although they were slightly longer at 430 feet (131 m). To save weight, ''Canopus'' carried less armour than the ''Majestic''s, although the change from Harvey armour in the ''Majestic''s to Krupp armour in ''Canopus'' meant that the loss in protection was not as great as it might have been, Krupp armour having greater protective value at a given weight than its Harvey equivalent.〔Pears:''British Battleships 1892–1957'',p.20 says that only the last ship, HMS ''Vengeance'', had Krupp armour〕 Still, the armour of the ''Canopus'' class was light enough to make them almost second-class battleships. Part of their armour scheme included the use of a special 1-inch (2.54 mm) armoured deck over the belt to defend against plunging fire by howitzers that France reportedly planned to install on its ships, although this report proved to be false.〔''Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860–1905'', p. 35〕 ''Canopus'' had four 12-inch (305-mm) 35-calibre guns mounted in twin turrets fore and aft; these guns were mounted in circular barbettes that allowed all-around loading, although at a fixed elevation.〔 The ships also mounted twelve 6-inch (152-mm) 40-calibre guns (sponson mounting allowing some of them to fire fore and aft) in addition to smaller guns, and four 18-inch (450-mm) submerged torpedo tubes.〔''Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860–1905'', p. 35, 36; Gibbons, p. 145〕 The ''Canopus''-class ships were the first British battleships with water-tube boilers, which generated more power at less expense in weight compared with the cylindrical boilers used in previous ships. The new boilers led to the adoption of fore-and-aft funnels, rather than the side-by-side funnel arrangement used in many previous British battleships. The ''Canopus''-class ships proved to be good steamers, consuming 10 tons of coal per hour at full speed,〔Gibbons, p. 145〕 with a high speed for battleships of their time, a full two knots faster than the ''Majestic''s.〔''Conway's All the World's Fighting Ships 1860–1905'', p. 35; Gibbons, p. 145〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「HMS Canopus (1897)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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