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HMS ''Vindictive'' was a warship built during the First World War for the Royal Navy (RN). Originally designed as a heavy cruiser and laid down under the name ''Cavendish'', she was converted into an aircraft carrier while still building. Renamed in 1918, she was completed a few weeks before the end of the war and saw no active service with the Grand Fleet. The following year she participated in the British campaign in the Baltic against the Bolsheviks during which her aircraft made numerous attacks against the naval base at Kronstadt. ''Vindictive'' returned home at the end of the year and was placed in reserve for several years before her flight decks were removed and she was reconverted back into a cruiser. The ship retained her aircraft hangar and conducted trials with a aircraft catapult before she was sent to the China Station in 1926. A year after her return in 1928, she was again placed in reserve. ''Vindictive'' was demilitarized and converted into a training ship in 1936–1937. At the beginning of the Second World War she was converted into a repair ship. Her first role after the conversion was completed in early 1940, however, was to transport troops during the Norwegian Campaign. She was then sent to the South Atlantic to support British ships serving there and, in late 1942, to the Mediterranean to support the ships there. ''Vindictive'' returned home in 1944 and was damaged by a German torpedo off the coast of Normandy after the Allies invaded France. She was reduced to reserve after the war and sold for scrap in 1946. ==Background and description== The ''Hawkins''-class cruiser was designed to hunt enemy commerce raiders overseas. This required a large ship to provide the necessary endurance for sustained operations away from supporting bases and high speed to catch the raiders. The design was also given high freeboard to allow it to maintain its speed in heavy weather. Sir Eustace Tennyson d'Eyncourt, the Director of Naval Construction, included both coal and oil-fired boilers to provide the ship with fuel no matter the supply conditions. Four ships were ordered, named after famous Elizabethan seafarers, in 1915 and the fifth and last was ordered in April 1916, named HMS ''Cavendish'' after the adventurer and circumnavigator Thomas Cavendish. By this time the threat from German cruisers and raiders had ended, so construction proceeded slowly.〔Friedman 2010, pp. 65; Raven & Roberts, pp. 51–52〕 The cruisers had an overall length of , a beam of , and a mean draught of at deep load. They were designed to displace and had a complement of 37 officers and 672 enlisted men.〔Friedman 2010, p. 390〕 The ships had four Parsons geared steam turbines, each of which drove one propeller shaft. The turbines were designed to produce a total of for a speed of . Steam for the turbines was provided by 12 Yarrow boilers; 8 of these were oil-fired while the remaining 4 used coal. They had a stowage capacity of of coal and of fuel oil, giving her a range of at a speed of .〔Hobbs, p. 41〕 The main armament of the ''Hawkins''-class cruisers consisted of seven 45-calibre in pivot mounts. They were arranged in two superfiring pairs, one each fore and aft of the superstructure, one on each broadside abreast the rear funnel, and the last was on the quarterdeck at the same level as the lower of the rear superfiring pair; they were designated 1 through 7 from front to rear.〔Raven & Roberts, p. 53〕 At maximum elevation these guns fired a shell to a range of .〔Friedman 2011, p. 78〕 Their secondary armament comprised a dozen quick-firing (QF) 3-inch 20 cwt guns. Eight of these were on low-angle mounts intended for use against torpedo boats and the remaining four were on high-angle mounts for anti-aircraft defence. They also mounted two submerged tubes, one on each broadside, and four above-water tubes, two on each broadside, for 21-inch torpedoes.〔 The ''Hawkins''-class cruisers were protected with an armour that had a maximum thickness of 4 inches abreast the ships' magazines and a minimum thickness of . It consisted of two layers of high-tensile steel of varying thicknesses that covered most of the ships' sides. The decks had a maximum thickness of over the engine rooms, boilers, and the steering gear. The conning tower and its communication tube were protected by the only Krupp cemented armour in the ships and had thicknesses of 3 inches and respectively.〔Friedman 2010, p. 67; Raven & Roberts, p. 405〕 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 Vindictive (1918)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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