Torpedo cruiser

Unlike the earlier vessels, these ships were intended to launch their Long Lance oxygen torpedoes at extreme range at night to surprise enemy warships.

The torpedo cruiser emerged from the Jeune École, a strategic naval concept that argued that the large ironclad battleships then being built in Europe could be easily—and more importantly, cheaply—defeated by small torpedo-armed warships.

[1] In newly unified Germany, the new torpedo cruiser was embraced as a powerful weapon for a new navy which had no real blue-water traditions of shipbuilding or seafaring.

The enthusiasm of the German Kaiserliche Admiralität (Imperial Admiralty) was particularly marked during the tenure of General Leo von Caprivi: a total of eight vessels were built, designed to serve with flotillas of smaller torpedo boats, and integrated into a defensive system of minefields and coastal artillery.

Concurrently with the German procurement of Zieten, the Italian Regia Marina laid down the small cruiser Pietro Micca in 1875, which was armed with a single torpedo tube and two machine guns.

[3] Starting in 1879, the French Navy also began experimenting with the type, first with the cruiser Milan, before building a series of smaller torpedo avisos similar to Zieten.

[5] Two of the Austro-Hungarian torpedo cruisers, Panther and Leopard, were designed by the English naval architect Sir William White, in the mid-1880s, when there was also a period of intense enthusiasm for the type at the British Admiralty.

These two ships would have a notable military success during the Chilean Civil War of 1891, when they attacked and sunk the ironclad Blanco Encalada at the Battle of Caldera Bay.

The concept was influenced by the Spanish torpedo cruiser Destructor launched in 1886, but the subsequent British type pioneered in 1892 was smaller and faster, and was quickly adopted by all the great power navies of the 1890s.

Renovation of Ōi and Kitakami began in 1941, with large-scale expansion of the hull, enlargement of the bridge, and removal of main and secondary artillery armaments.