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''Veshchun'' ((ロシア語:Вещун)) was an monitor built for the Imperial Russian Navy in Belgium in the mid-1860s. The design was based on the American , but was modified to suit Russian engines, guns and construction techniques. She was one of two ships of the class to be built in Belgium and assembled in Russia. Spending her entire career with the Baltic Fleet, the ship was only active when the Gulf of Finland was not frozen, but very little is known about her service. She was stricken in 1900 from the Navy List, converted into a coal barge in 1903 and renamed ''Barzha No. 44'' then ''Barzha No. 327''. Abandoned by the Soviets in Finland in 1918, the ship was later scrapped by the Finns. ==Description== ''Veshchun'' was long overall, with a beam of and a draft of . She displaced , and her crew numbered eight officers and 88 enlisted men in 1865. They numbered 10 officers and 100 crewmen in 1877.〔McLaughlin, p. 103〕 The ship was fitted with a two-cylinder, horizontal direct-acting steam engine〔 built by the Belgian Cockerill Company. It drove a single propeller〔McLaughlin, pp. 106–07〕 using steam that was provided by two rectangular boilers.〔Chesneau & Kolesnik, p. 175〕 Specific information on the output of the ship's engine has not survived, but it ranged between for all the ships of this class. During ''Veshchun''s sea trials on 21 July 1864, she reached a maximum speed of . The ship carried a maximum of of coal, which gave her a theoretical endurance of at .〔McLaughlin, p. 107〕 ''Veshchun'' was designed to be armed with a pair of smoothbore muzzle-loading guns purchased from Krupp of Germany and rifled in Russia, but the rifling project was seriously delayed and the ship was completed with nine-inch smoothbores. These lacked the penetration power necessary to deal with ironclads and they were replaced by license-built smoothbore muzzle-loading Rodman guns in 1867–68. The Rodman guns were replaced around 1876 with the originally intended nine-inch rifled guns.〔McLaughlin, pp. 104–05〕 All of the wrought-iron armor that was used in the ''Uragan''-class monitors was in plates, just as in the ''Passaic''-class ships. The side of the ship was entirely covered with three to five layers of armor plates, of which the three innermost plates extended below the waterline. This armor was backed by a wooden beam that had a maximum thickness of . The gun turret and the pilothouse above it was protected by eleven layers of armor. Curved plates six layers thick protected the base of the funnel up to a height of above the deck. Unlike their predecessors, the ''Uragan''s were built without deck armor to save weight, but ''Veshchun''s deck was later prepared for the addition of armor plates, although they were never installed.〔McLaughlin, pp. 105–06〕 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「Russian monitor Veschun」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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