Sankt Jacobus Class Armoured Cruiser

A fictional 1900-1910 armoured cruiser based upon the Tsukuba class, SMS Sankt Georg, and SMS Roon. She is the final ship in the set, along side the Wien and Szigetvar. This is because the K.u. K Kriegsmarine held a building order of ships, where for every line of Pre-dreadnought battleships launched (Wien, for example), they would launch a line of Protected/Scout cruisers (The Szigetvar), and a single Armoured Cruiser to serve as a scout ship for the Battle-line formed by the new Battleship line, which is the purpose of the SMS Sankt Jakobus. The SMS Sankt Jakobus was an armoured cruiser of the K.u. K Kriegsmarine designed along side the Wien class of Pre-dreadnought battleship. All of the class were built in the Stabilimento Tecnico Triestino shipyards in Trieste. She was, was laid down in 1902, and was commissioned 1905. The Sankt Jakobus was designed to serve as the scout ship for the Wien class of Battleship, as is standard for K.u. K Armoured Cruisers of this period. She was specifically designed around a double-stacked casemate armament to facilitate an extremely heavy secondary armament, with even the torpedoes, standard for this period, being forgone in favour of more firepower. Some argue that she was effectively a pocket-battlecruiser, or semi-battlecruiser, similar to a semi-dreadnought, due to her focus on armament, high speed, and large size. This particular design philosophy was taken in order to counter all of Italy's armoured cruisers, as Italy fielded nothing with comparable size, armament, or armour, and render them all obsolete. However, in short order came the advent of the wide-spread use of Dreadnoughts and Battlecruisers, which rendered her outdated and invalidated, much the same as almost all pre-dreadnoughts. The SMS Sankt Jakobus had an overall length of 131 meters (430 ft), a beam of 21 meters (69 ft) and had a designed draft of 8 meters (26 ft). The class had a designed displacement of 13,400 metric tonnes (13,188 long tons). She had a pair