The Ships that Fisher Scrapped: Orlando Class (The Forgotten Coast Guard)

Meet the Orlando-class armored cruisers: long-range Royal Navy ships built for global presence and imperial policing.

Examine the mixed gun battery, broadside and submerged torpedo tubes, and heavy protection of a first-class armoured cruiser.

Follow the Orlandos from China and the Boxer Rebellion to their later use as coast-guard and reserve ships.

The British coast. The Orlandos also served as British coast-guard ships.

Mostly independently, because the China and Australia stations had little supporting infrastructure.

Yes. The 9.2-inch gun was a well-established upper-end cruiser weapon that might have returned without treaty restrictions.

Eight inches was considered too weak, while eleven inches was too slow and difficult to maintain; 9.2 inches was the preferred middle ground.

Fisher also chose ships whose removal he expected to provoke the least opposition, and the reserve Orlandos were vulnerable on that basis.

Inspect the Orlando-class weapons arrangement, protected midsection, and hull form praised in naval-architecture manuals.

A photograph of HMS Immortalité saluting Queen Victoria's birthday in Japan contradicts a claim that she never served in the Far East.

That may have shaped Fisher's thinking, but cruiser design still needed to prioritize presence and trade protection over a place in the battle line.

Another armored cruiser would be the natural opponent; a battlecruiser is also suggested as a possibility.

To an extent. Manual shell handling helps explain the calibre, while the discussion also notes the use of naval guns to support troops ashore.

Their crews were about 480 and not unusually large for cruisers. The ships were also still relatively young when scrapped.

Many of Fisher's ideas are supported. The objection concerns how he implemented them.

The records portray them as liked, capable ships with genuine long-range endurance rather than a class undermined by a known defect.

In that interpretation, Fisher selected an unwanted ship as he worked down the list rather than starting from the bottom.

Yes. Heavy-artillery production for both services was concentrated in a small shared group of firms.

Not really. The evidence is scattered and has to be assembled from the historical literature.

British Cruisers of the Victorian Era is recommended, with the caution that not every interpretation in it is accepted.

Possibly. The idea connects to a speculative discussion of HMS Incomparable and postwar naval treaties.

It remains a suggestion rather than a recommendation: the book has not been read, and the reply is uncertain about its authorship.

An Orlando would have put USS Monitor in serious trouble, although gun depression could have made the low ironclad difficult to hit.

Technology changed quickly, but the Orlandos still had economical, credible convoy-escort value that fleet-battle thinking overlooked.

Yes. Fisher promised budget reductions as part of obtaining the post and carried them out.

Potentially. Flooding the firing side might provide the extra depression needed, but the idea receives only a tentative endorsement.

Expected engagement ranges were close enough that ramming was still seen as a practical way of sinking an enemy ship.

It applies more to USS Monitor in this comparison.

See why the Orlandos' armour could have made them valuable convoy escorts even against faster enemy cruisers.

That explanation does not fit Fisher's later designs, which continued to include armored conning towers.

They could have done quite well early in the Adriatic campaign, although their later-war usefulness is less certain.

Not for an armored cruiser of this era. The type stood immediately below battleships in the contemporary status hierarchy.