French submarine Fructidor
Fructidor was one of 18 s built for the French Navy () in the first decade of the 20th century. Design and description. The "Pluviôse" class were built as part of the French Navy's 1905 building program to a double-hull design by Maxime Laubeuf. The submarines displaced surfaced and submerged. They had an overall length of , a beam of , and a draft of . Their crew numbered 2 officers and 23 enlisted men. For surface running, the boats were powered by two triple-expansion steam engines, each driving one propeller shaft using steam provided by two Du  Temple boilers. When submerged each propeller was driven by a electric motor. On the surface they were designed to reach a maximum speed of and underwater. The submarines had a surface endurance of at and a submerged endurance of at . The first six boats completed were armed with a single internal bow torpedo tube, but this was deleted from the rest of the submarines after an accident with their sister in 1909. All of the boats were fitted with six 450 mm external torpedo launchers; the pair firing forward were fixed outwards at an angle of seven degrees and the  rear pair had an angle of five degrees. Following a ministerial order on 22 February 1910, the aft tubes were reversed so they too fired forward, but at an angle of eight degrees. The other launchers were a rotating pair of Drzewiecki drop collars in a single mount positioned on top of the hull at the stern. They could traverse 150 degrees to each side of the boat. The "Pluviôse"-class submarines carried eight torpedoes. Construction and career. "Fructidor", named after the third month of summer in the French Republican calendar, was ordered on 26 August 1905 from the Arsenal de  Cherbourg. The submarine was laid down in 1906, launched on 13 November 1909 and commissioned on 29 June 1910.