Russian battleship Petr Velikyy (1872)
Petr Velikiy before her reconstruction in 1904
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| History | |
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 Russian Empire
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| Name: | Petr Velikiy |
| Namesake: | Peter the Great |
| Operator: | Imperial Russian Navy |
| Builder: | Galerniy Island Shipyard, Saint Petersburg |
| Cost: | over 5.5 million rubles |
| Laid down: | 23 July 1870 |
| Launched: | 27 August 1872 |
| Decommissioned: | 21 May 1921 |
| In service: | 14 October 1876 |
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| Reclassified: |
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| Struck: | 18 April 1959 |
| Fate: | Scrapped after April 1959 |
| General characteristics (as built) | |
| Type: | Turret ship |
| Displacement: | 10,406 long tons (10,573 t) |
| Length: | 333 ft 8 in (101.7 m) |
| Beam: | 63 ft (19.2 m) |
| Draft: | 24 ft 9 in (7.5 m) (designed) |
| Installed power: | 8,258 ihp (6,158 kW) |
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| Speed: | about 13 knots (24 km/h; 15 mph) |
| Range: | 2,900 nautical miles (5,400 km; 3,300 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph) |
| Complement: | 24 officers and 417 crewmen |
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Petr Velikiy (Russian: Пётр Великий – Peter the Great) was an ironclad turret ship built for the Imperial Russian Navy during the 1870s. Her engines and boilers were defective, but were not replaced until 1881. The ship made a cruise to the Mediterranean after they were installed, and before returning to the Baltic Fleet, where she remained for the rest of her career. She did not, like the rest of the Baltic Fleet, participate in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878. Petr Veliky was deemed obsolete by the late 1890s, but she was not ordered to be converted into a gunnery training ship until 1903.
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 slowed her reconstruction, and the ship was not completed until 1908. She spent most of World War I as a training ship, although she became a depot ship for submarines in 1917. Petr Veliky was in Helsinki in March 1918 when the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk required the Soviets to evacuate their naval base at Helsinki or have their ships interned by newly independent Finland even though the Gulf of Finland was still frozen over. The ship reached Kronstadt in April 1918 and was hulked on 21 May 1921. She remained in service with the Soviets, in various secondary roles, until she was finally stricken from the Navy List in 1959 and subsequently scrapped.
Petr Veliky had its genesis in the visit of the American twin-turret monitor USS Miantonomoh to Kronstadt in August 1866, that inspired Rear Admiral A. A. Popov to submit a preliminary design for a low-freeboard, breastwork monitor with a full suite of sails and masts. He intended the ship to act as a hybrid monitor-cruiser, able to attack enemy shipping and threaten his ports. The design was approved by the Naval Technical Committee (Russian: Morskoi tekhnicheskii komitet), and a detailed design was prepared by September 1867. This was reviewed on 20 February 1868, and the coal supply was ordered to be raised from four to five days' steaming, which forced the design to be revised to accommodate the extra coal. This modified design was approved on 26 January 1869 by the Committee, but more changes were made even after that. In May Popov proposed to add a small superstructure forward of the breastwork to improve seakeeping and overhanging side armor as used on the monitors during the American Civil War. Both changes were approved on 19 June 1869 although the displacement of the ship had constantly increased from the 7,496 long tons (7,616 t) of the 1867 design to the 9,462 long tons (9,614 t) of the June 1869 design.
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