The first task which needed to be accomplished before construction on any new ships could begin was securing the necessary funding. A navy design board evaluated five designs for the new battleship type between 25 and 29 September 1905. This included twelve battleships, four armored cruisers, eight scout cruisers, eighteen destroyers, thirty-six large torpedo boats, and six submarines. By the end of July 1905, the Austrian Commander in Chief of the Navy, Admiral Monteccuccoli, laid out his vision for an expanded Austro-Hungarian fleet. All three ships were handed over to Italy after the end of the war, and broken up for scrap between 19.ĭesign work for a new class of battleships started about two weeks after the launching of Erzherzog Friedrich, an Erzherzog Karl-class battleship, which took place on 30 April 1904. After 1915, their participation in the war became minimal. After Italy declared war on Austro-Hungary and the other Central Powers in 1915, the three Radetzky-class ships bombarded coastal targets in the Adriatic Sea.
In 1913, they took part in an international naval demonstration in the Ionian Sea that protested the Balkan Wars. All three of the battleships conducted training cruises in the Mediterranean Sea in 1912. They were armed with four 30.5-centimeter (12.0 in) guns in two twin turrets and eight 24 cm (9.4 in) guns in four twin turrets.Ĭommissioned only a few years before the outbreak of World War I, the ships had limited service careers. The class comprised three ships: Radetzky, Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand, and Zrínyi. They were the last pre-dreadnoughts built by the Austro-Hungarians, and the penultimate class of any type of Austro-Hungarian battleship completed. All ships were built by the STT shipyard in Trieste. The Radetzky class was a group of three semi-dreadnought battleships built for the Austro-Hungarian Navy between 19. 2 shaft vertical triple expansion steam engines
0 kommentar(er)
