- Yes
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As part of the great repopulating of the new suggestions forum with old legacy ones both live, considered, and all but forgotten, allow me to introduce (and vastly, VASTLY improve) one of my very oldest suggestions- way back from the Naval Open Beta Test days of Patch 1.83, specifically October 26th, 2018.
This is the re-suggestion of one of my earliest legacy suggestions: The Tribal-class Torpedo Boat Destroyer of 1905, specifically one of the 3rd Programme (1908/1909) Late-pattern models, more specifically the one featuring one of the most extraordinary beginnings of almost any ship ever built in human history… and somehow actually not clickbait.
This is HMS Zubian (D99), a literal Frankenstein’s Monster of a ship, born from the rear 2/3rds of HMS Nubian combined with the remaining bow of HMS Zulu… all to resurrect an obsolescent ship at just about the only time in history that this would’ve been done; and with a ship small enough to accept the cost- at the height of the War To End All Wars, World War One, in 1917.
HMS Nubian, sometime between 1911-1914. the entire raised bow section would be blown off by a torpedo and replaced by the bow from HMS Zulu years later.
DESIGN HISTORY:
the Tribal-class Torpedo Boat Destroyer, or alternatively the F-class as they were redesignated in 1913… not to be mistaken for the Tribal-class of 1936… nor the F-class of 1934… real imaginative naming there chaps… was a mid-1900s design of ship at right around the time when torpedo boat destroyers were just starting to get big enough and powerful enough that they might start posing a threat to larger ships, AKA dropping the torpedo boat part and just being called Destroyer.
This incarnation of Tribal-class was itself a sign of these changing times- the 1st Programme Early Model ships of HMS Afridi, Cossack, Gurkha, Mohawk, and Tartar had 4 (soon after, 5) 3-inch/76mm QF 12-pounders, meanwhile the middle production 1906-07 2nd programme run of HMS Saracen and Amazon, and 1908-09 3rd programme of HMS Crusader, Maori, Nubian, Viking, and Zulu replaced the 12-pounders with a pair of BL 4-inch cannons- the distinct difference between the first generation of what we’d just call a Destroyer, and the last of the ye olde Torpedo Boat Destroyer and their sub-100mm main guns, like the River-class (redesignated as the E-class in 1913) which the Tribal-class was meant to supplement- showing that the rate of technological improvement even after the turn of the century was still so fast it could obsolete a then-state of the art design in only a few years.
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The origin of the Tribal-class comes from November 1904, when First Sea Lord and resident naval mad scientist John “Jackie” Fisher made the proposition of a new class of torpedo boat destroyer with a top speed of at least 33 knots (61 km/h) with the usage of oil-fired boilers and steam turbines as opposed to coal-firing from Vertical Triple Expansion reciprocating steam piston engines as seen on the River-class.
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This requirement; as with anything thought up by Lord Fisher; had its wild ups and downs, and the result was an almost oversized ship for its type in order to fit the large turbine engines that provided for a far higher amount of shaft horsepower at 12,500 shp (9300 kW), later up to 14,500 shp depending on the particular ship and its installed machinery vs the late model River-class’s 7,700 shp (5,700 kW)…
…
…but at the cost of pushing the design to its limits (which Fisher had an alarming habit of causing) by installing what was then cutting edge technology on a platform that wasn’t entirely quite ready- keep in mind this is 1905, this is directly contemporary with the construction of the first turbine-driven battleship, the legendary HMS Dreadnought.
The result of this was an impressively fast and high-tech design for the mid-1900s, but in the larger picture was debatably a step back in overall practicality compared to the earlier River-class, as the Tribal-class was comparatively lightly built and later was shown to be somewhat fragile during WWI.
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The biggest downside to the 1905 Tribal-class was that it was just an absolute PIG of a gas-guzzler. Provided with only 90 tons of fuel oil storage and a very high rate of fuel consumption due to use of 1st generation direct drive steam turbines instead of reciprocating piston VTE Steam Engines, the Tribal-class was shown to be ridiculously uneconomical to the point that they could barely reach beyond the coast.
There’s even a direct quote on the topic that shows just how limited the range was on these proto-Destroyers:
“More alarmingly however, they were only provided with 90 tons of bunkerage, and with high fuel consumption resulting from the unheard of power of 12,500 shp, they were very uneconomical and had a severely limited radius of action; Afridi and Amazon once used 9.5 tons of oil each simply to raise steam for a three-mile (5 km) return journey to a fuel depot.”
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at this time, the Royal Navy had a quirky practice with its TBDs, and that was to just let the companies designing each ship work out the little details- in all fairness these were tertiary level warships after all.
As a result, the Tribal-class was a very heterogeneous family, and the details and in some ways appearance could be completely different in some areas… who knows, maybe they were secretly built by the French.
The most notable example is in the funnels… mainly the number of them.
Some had 3 funnels. Totally normal for ships around this time.
Most had 4 funnels. Still okay, these are extreme speed sprinters so the extra exhaust helps.
It’s like a time traveling Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts player got bored and made the biggest mess they could make out of a ship so small.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/HMS_Viking_1910.jpg
HMS Viking, 1910.
yes. 6 funnels (two singles, two doubles). on a mid-1900s transitional Destroyer…
…because reasons.
This may come as a shock, but HMS Viking was both the first and last destroyer EVER to use 6 funnels.
Oh as if all that wasn’t enough, in addition to effectively being giant coast guard cutters due to their badly limited range… they were too large to efficiently defend the coast of England. This had to result in an entirely different class of large torpedo boats; the Cricket-class 1st class Torpedo Boat, also of 1905; existing purely because the Tribals had to have SOMETHING as a companion to backstop for coastal defense.
in the long run, the Tribal-class proved to be kind of a failure in all aspects save for brute force performance, and for the following class of destroyer in the Beagle-class of 1908 (redesignated G-class in 1913), the admiralty reverted to a more refined and somewhat less balls-to-the-wall design for the 1908/09 programme… while ordering another 5 Tribals. Because reasons.
HISTORY:
Due to the unique creation of HMS Zubian, a brief mention of Nubian and Zulu is required:
HMS Nubian and HMS Zulu were part of the late model Tribal-class production run, with their subclass consisting of HMS Crusader, Maori, Nubian, Viking, and Zulu, and featured the use of two single 4-inch BL Mark VIII guns on P.III mountings, replacing the five single 76mm 12-pounder 12 cwt guns.
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With HMS Nubian, The October 26th/27th, 1916, Battle of Dover Strait happened, when a bunch of German torpedo boats swarmed a convoy of British ships in the vicinity of the Dover Barrage; a massive German minefield meant to make merchant shipping in the English channel a total nightmare; and mauled the convoy with little resistance. In the sequence of events for HMS Nubian, the Germans planted a torpedo right underneath the bridge (just behind the first funnel) and very nearly blew Nubian’s entire bow off before retreating. The crippled Nubian was towed for a short time until the tow rope broke and the rest of the crumpled bow fell off, necessitating Nubian to power back up and quickly beach itself, later being towed to Calais after a rushed patch job.
So now you have a faceless ship who’s heart still beat, but about a third of the ship was now somewhere else… that being in a million pieces on the seabed just offshore of Dover.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a0/HMSNubian.jpg
HMS Nubian, 1916, post-bow beaching on the shores of Dover
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meanwhile with HMS Zulu… well… It hit a mine off Dunkirk in November 1916. not nearly the heroic near-death of Nubian, but c’est la vie. This mine went off just beneath the Zulu’s engine room, gutting the amidships third of the ship, and breaking off the entire stern, AKA the rear third, which then sunk… again proving these ships were rather fragile.
the rest of the ship however… which was now mostly the bow and some swiss cheese that used to be the midsection… was towed to Calais.
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Later, now in 1917, instead of scrapping two partial ship hulls at the height of WWI and unrestricted submarine warfare, The admiralty decided to just have the bow of Zulu fitted to the missing face of Nubian and just frankenstein them back together, hence the literal and literary portmanteau that was Zubian.
Incidentally funnily enough in a little side note this confused the hell out of the German admiralty when word got back to them, since there was no ship of that name having been built, but here this ghost ship was.
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As for Zubian… she made no token effort either.
After being commissioned in 1917, Zubian with her new pennant number of D99 joined… rejoined?.. the other Tribal-class TBDs in 6th Flotilla; a subdivision of the fearsome Harwich Force; and their task: hunting U-boats.
On February 4th, 1918, HMS Zubian encountered a surfaced U-boat.
This turned out to be SM UC-50 of Type UC II-class of minelaying submarines, the most successfully homicidal submarine class in human history by way of recorded confirmed kills- not to be confused for tonnage sunk, just outright ships and boats sunk.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/SM_U_35_Hafen.jpg
Type UC II-class submarines, circa 1916
Zubian then went for the incredibly ballsy move given her inherent fragility of trying to ram UC-50, though UC-50 crash dived just in time… for the follow up depth charging.
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And thus, the revenant ship that was HMS Zubian; a ship frankensteined from the wreckage of two dead ships and brought back into service as an undead submarine hunter, scored a later- confirmed kill on a until-then highly successful German submarine.
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With that moment of glory past, Zubian would later be part of Operation ZO; AKA the First Ostend Raid; on the night of April 23rd-24th 1918. This action was intended to bottle up and close the occupied Belgian ports and; oh hey!; U-boat bases of Ostend and Zeebrugge and then sink some old cruisers as blockships at the harbor entrances of Ostend… only for the cruisers to run aground in a completely wrong area and make the whole raid a total waste. Oh well.
The rest of the war would be inconsequential to Zubian.
Once peace were declared, Zubian’s post-post-mortem days were numbered. After 5 years of peacetime service, and then 4 years of very heavy wartime usage… and you know… the stresses of GETTING KILLED once, the once-cutting edge machinery and hull of Nubian/Zulu/Zubian was on its last legs anyways.
HMS Zubian (D99) would be quickly sold in the immediate aftermath of the end of the Great War, and by the end of 1919 was broken up for scrap.
GENERAL CHARACTERISTICS
Displacement:
~1,020 long tons at any given time, though mainly with an intact bow
Length:
85.4 m (280 ft) (Nubian and Zulu were about the same length)
Beam:
8.14 m (27 ft) (Nubian was slsightly thinner than Zulu)
Draft:
3.05 m (9.8 ft) (rough average for the entire class)
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Powerplant:
6 Thornycroft Three-Drum Boilers, feeding into 3 sets of direct drive Parsons Steam Turbines, producing ~14,000 shaft horsepower, going to 3 sets of propellers, producing 33 knot speeds
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Crew:
68
ARMAMENT:
Alongside the switch from 3-inch guns to 4-inch guns on the late production Tribals, the 18-inch torpedoes were updated from the Mk.V to the model 1907 Mk.VII and almost immediately supplemented with the Mk.VII*, which had both speed settings slightly slower than the Mk.VII, but conversely slightly greater range
2x1 4-inch/102mm BL Mark VIII guns on P.III mountings, one fore , one aft
ammo count was 120 rounds per gun- featuring an HE shell, and a common shell
The P.III mounting could elevate and depress from +20 to -10 degrees, but though its sight could match the 20 degree elevation, the range dial was only graduated to 9,300 yards from a muzzle velocity of 2,225 fps.
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2x1 18-inch Mark VII and Mark VII* from two tubes on the centerline.
6 torpedoes were carried, two ready in the tubes plus 2 reloads each
Mark VII:
30 knots (56 km/h; 35 mph) for 6,000–7,000 yd (5,500–6,400 m)
41 knots (76 km/h; 47 mph) for 3,000 yd (2,700 m)
Mark VII*:
29 knots (54 km/h; 33 mph) for 7,000 yd (6,400 m)
35 knots (65 km/h; 40 mph) for 5,000 yd (4,600 m)
Torpedo Warhead:
320 lb (150 kg) TNT across the Mk.VII family
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_18_inch_torpedo#18_inch_Mark_VII_and_VII*
SOURCES:
online:
individual ships (from wikipedia so some pages are kind of useless:)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Nubian_(1909)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Zulu_(1909)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Zubian
Tribal type destroyers (COSSACK) (13, 1908 - 1910) (navypedia.org)
http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/tfs/index.php/Tribal_Class_Destroyer_(1907) Dreadnoughtproject actually has quite a lot of useful, original, and especially detailed information.
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literary:
Cocker, Maurice. Destroyers of the Royal Navy, 1893-1981. Ian Allan, 1983. ISBN 0-7110-1075-7
Friedman, Norman. British Destroyers: From Earliest Days to the Second World War. Barnsley, UK: Seaforth Publishing, 2009. ISBN 978-1-84832-049-9. PDF page 231-233
Gardiner, Robert and Gray, Randal. Conway’s All The World’s Fighting Ships 1906–1921. London: Conway Maritime Press, 1985. ISBN 0-85177-245-5. PDF page 82
March, Edgar J. (1966). British Destroyers: A History of Development, 1892-1953. London: Seeley Service & Co. Limited.