Courageous Class Large Light Cruisers

Courageous Class.  They were protected as a light cruiser but had battlecruiser calibre guns.  The secondary armament was mainly a new triple 4 inch mount that although in theory had a high rate of fire was actually disappointing in service owing to being complicated to operate.  They were the first major warships to have geared turbines and the first large British warships with small tube boilers.

HMS Courageous
Built Armstrong, Elswick, laid down March 1915, completed January 1917.

HMS Glorious
Built Harland & Wolf, laid down April 1915, completed January 1917.

Size:
Length 735 feet pp 786 feet 9 inches overall, beam 81 feet, draught 24 feet 3 inches, displacement 19,180 tons load 22,560 tons deep load.

Propulsion:
4 shaft Parsons turbines, 90,000 shp, 32kts

Trials:
Glorious 94,450 ihp = 31.58 knots

Armour:
3-2in belt, 7in barbettes, 13in turret faces, 1.5-0.5in decks

Armament:
4 x 15in 42cal Mk1 (2 x 2), 18 x 4in 44cal Mk IX (6 x 3), 2 x 3in (2 x 1), 2 x 3pounder, 2 x 21in TT

Comments:
Along with their half sister HMS Furious, these ships are probably the most controversial and criticised ships to serve in any navy.  Conceived by Admiral Fisher to support his plan for an attack on the German coast in the Baltic and had a shallow draft and high speed for this role.  The class used turrets ordered for cancelled battleships of the 1914 programme built rather than use them on a conventional battlecruiser they were used on these Large Light Cruisers - necessary to get around a ban by the British cabinet on the construction of new capital ships. Both ships were converted to aircraft carriers in the 1920s.  Crew 787.

World War 1 Service:
Courageous
1917 2nd Cruiser Squadron
October 1917 convoy protection for Scandinavian Convoys.
21 November 1917 Took part in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight
1924 Rebuilt as aircraft carrier.
1940 sunk by German warships.

Glorious
1917 2nd Cruiser Squadron
October 1917 convoy protection for Scandinavian Convoys.
21 November 1917 Took part in the Second Battle of Heligoland Bight
1924 Rebuilt as aircraft carrier.
1939 torpedoed and sunk by German submarine U29.

HMS Courageous saw action in 1917 in an inconclusive raid on German patrols.  The heavy guns on a light hull caused some cracking when fired but nothing too serious and extra strengthening was added to the hull which appears to have solved the problem.