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Concept
Steam gun boat
Summary
Steam gun boats (SGBs) were small Royal Navy vessels built from 1940 to 1942 for Coastal Forces during the Second World War. The class consisted of nine steam-powered torpedo boats.
They were developed in parallel with the 35-metre long Fairmile D motor torpedo boats ("dog boats"), specifically due to the need to hunt down German E-boats at a time of scarcity of suitable diesel engines. While sixty were planned, only an initial batch of nine were ordered on 8 November 1940, of which seven were completed.
The steam gun boats were conceived to answer the seeming need for a craft which was large enough to put to sea in rough weather and which could operate both as a "super-gunboat" and a torpedo carrier, combining the functions of the motor gunboat (MGB) and motor torpedo boat (MTB) in the same fashion as did the German E-boats. The Admiralty wanted Denny to produce a design that was suitable for pre-fabrication construction to enable large numbers to be built.
They were the largest of the Coastal Forces vessels, and were the only ones to be built of steel (to meet the fast production requirement – all other Coastal Forces craft were of wood). They resembled a miniature destroyer, and were perhaps the most graceful of all the craft produced during the Second World War. However their comparatively large silhouette was a drawback, making them too easy a target for the faster German craft.
They were long and had a displacement of 172 tons (202 tons fully fuelled). They were powered by two Metropolitan-Vickers geared steam turbines using special LaMont boilers. These boilers proved to be particularly vulnerable to attack and – once the vessel had broken down – required a major effort to repair. Steam had the advantage of quietness but demanded a large hull. Large wooden hulls were not feasible for mass production, so steel was used. This meant hulls and machinery were beyond the scope of the small yards engaged in the rapid expansion of the coastal forces, and the SGB thus competed for berths in yards already hard put to produce urgently required convoy escorts.
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