HMS Rattlesnake (1886)
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Rattlesnake lowering boats
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| History | |
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 UK
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| Name: | HMS Rattlesnake |
| Ordered: | 1885 |
| Builder: | Laird Brothers, Birkenhead |
| Cost: |
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| Yard number: | 537 |
| Laid down: | 16 November 1885 |
| Launched: | 11 September 1886 |
| Commissioned: | May 1887 |
| Fate: | Sold in 1910 |
| General characteristics | |
| Class and type: | Torpedo gunboat |
| Displacement: | 550 long tons (559 t) |
| Length: | 200 ft (61 m) pp |
| Beam: | 23 ft (7 m) |
| Depth of hold: | 10 ft 2 in (3.1 m) |
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| Complement: | 66 |
| Armament: |
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| Armour: | 3⁄4-in protective deck only |
HMS Rattlesnake was a unique design of torpedo gunboat of the Royal Navy. A result of the Russian war scare of 1885, she was designed by Nathaniel Barnaby that year and built by Laird Brothers, of Birkenhead. Quickly made obsolete by the new torpedo boat destroyers, she became an experimental submarine target ship in 1906, and was sold in 1910.
Designed by Nathaniel Barnaby in 1885, Rattlesnake was, like the torpedo cruisers and the Curlew-class gunvessels, built in response to the Russian War scare. They were intended as a form of gunboat armed with torpedoes and designed for hunting and destroying smaller torpedo boats. By the end of the 1890s torpedo gunboats were superseded by their more successful contemporaries, the torpedo boat destroyers, and this quickly made Rattlesnake and her follow-on classes, the Grasshoppers, Sharpshooters, Alarms and Dryads, obsolete.
Exactly 200 feet (61 m) long and 23 feet (7.0 m) in beam, she displaced 550 tons. Built of steel, Rattlesnake was un-armoured with the exception of a 3⁄4-inch protective deck. She was armed with a single 4-inch/25-pounder breech-loading gun, six 3-pounder QF guns and four 14-inch (360 mm) torpedo tubes, arranged with two fixed tubes at the bow and a set of torpedo dropping carriages on either side. Four torpedo reloads were carried.
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