A destroyer-fighting battery with little protection

The Sentinel class carried ten quick-firing 12-pounder guns, eight smaller 3-pounders, and two single 18-inch torpedo tubes. The numerous light battery suited a ship intended to work with destroyers and engage small craft rather than trade blows with armoured cruisers. Protection consisted mainly of a thin armoured deck, varying from five-eighths of an inch to one and a half inches, plus a three-inch conning tower. The thin protection shows how strongly the design favoured machinery, speed, and weapons over survivability. A brief Second World War comparison is explicitly hypothetical: fitted with radar, ten 3-inch guns might have offered useful convoy anti-aircraft fire, although the ship was slow for that later era.