page_title: Scharnhorst-class cruiser
section_title: Design
hierarchical_section_title: Scharnhorst-class cruiser / Design
caption_attribution_description: English: Title: YORCK (German Armored Cruiser, 1905-1914) Caption: Photographed by A. Renard of Kiel, Germany, passing under the Levensau Bridge along the Kiel Canal in a print dated about 1910 (The photograph may date from earlier).
context_page_description: The Scharnhorst class was the last traditional class of armored cruisers built by the Kaiserliche Marine. The class comprised two ships, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau. They were larger than the Roon-class cruisers that preceded them; the extra size was used primarily to increase the main armament of 21 cm guns from four to eight. The ships were the first German cruiser to reach equality with their British counterparts. The ships were named after 19th century Prussian army reformers, Gerhard von Scharnhorst and August von Gneisenau.
  Built for overseas service, Scharnhorst and Gneisenau were assigned to the East Asia Squadron in 1909 and 1910, respectively. Scharnhorst relieved the old armored cruiser Fürst Bismarck as the squadron flagship, which had been on station since 1900. Both ships had short careers; shortly before the outbreak of World War I, the ships departed the German colony at Tsingtao. On 1 November 1914, the ships destroyed a British force at the Battle of Coronel and inflicted upon the Royal Navy its first defeat since the Battle of Plattsburgh in 1814.
context_section_description: The Second Naval Law in Germany, passed in 1900, envisioned a force of fourteen armored cruisers for both service overseas in Germany's colonial empire and as scouts for the main battle fleet in German waters. The naval expansion program was primarily directed against the British Royal Navy, then the world's preeminent naval force. Germany's armored cruiser force followed a series of iterative developments based on the cruiser Prinz Heinrich, and the Scharnhorst class represented the culmination of that evolutionary development.
  During the design process for the class, the General Department issued a request that the new cruisers be capable of fighting in the line of battle in the event that German battleships were damaged and unable to continue fighting. Up to this point, this had not been a consideration in German armored cruiser construction, and so a significant increase in both firepower and armor protection would be required to accommodate it. This in turn required much larger ships, and the Scharnhorsts were accordingly about 2,000 t (2,000 long tons; 2,200 short tons) heavier than the preceding Roons. The weight increase secured a doubling of the main battery, a 50% increase in belt armor, and an increase in top speed by more than a knot over the Roon class. The speed increase was achieved by the addition of two boilers that provided 7,100 metric horsepower (7,000 ihp) more power for the propulsion system. As a result of these improvements, the Scharnhorst class was the first German armored cruiser design that compared favorably to its foreign counterparts.
  Several other minor changes were introduced, including a strengthening of the tertiary battery of 8.8 cm (3.5 in) guns to the level used in contemporary battleships like the Deutschland class. The design staff considered adding a pair of these guns to the conning tower roof abreast of the bridge, but experience with the same arrangement on the Braunschweig-class battleships demonstrated the excessive blast effect interfered with control of the ships, and so those guns were suppressed in the Scharnhorst design.
caption: Yorck of the preceding Roon class, the basis for the Scharnhorst design
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