SMS Brandenburg - Construction

Construction

For more details on this topic, see Brandenburg-class battleship.

Brandenburg was ordered as battleship A, the first ship of her class. She was laid down at Germaniawerft in Kiel in 1890. Her hull was completed by September 1891 and launched on 21 September. Fitting out work followed and was finished by later 1893; the ship was commissioned into the fleet on 19 November 1893, less than four weeks after her sister Wörth, the first vessel in the class to join the fleet.

The ship was 115.7 m (379 ft 7 in) long, with a beam of 19.5 m (64 ft 0 in) and a draft of 7.6 m (24 ft 11 in). Brandenburg displaced 10,013 t (9,855 long tons) as designed, and up to 10,670 t (10,501 long tons) at full combat load. She was equipped with two sets of 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion steam engines that produced 10,000 indicated horsepower (7,457 kW) and a top speed of 16.9 knots (31.3 km/h; 19.4 mph) on trials. Steam was provided by twelve transverse cylindrical boilers. She had a maximum range of 4,300 nautical miles (8,000 km; 4,900 mi) at a cruising speed of 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph).

Brandenburg was armed with a main battery of six 28 cm (11 in) guns of two types. The forward and rear turret guns were 40 calibers long, while the amidships guns were only 35 calibers; this was necessary to allow them to train to either side of the ship. Her secondary armament initially consisted of seven 10.5 cm (4.1 in) guns, though an additional gun was added during the modernization in 1901. She also carried eight 8.8 cm (3.45 in) guns and six 45 cm (17.7 in) torpedo tubes.