Unprotected Cruisers

Unprotected cruisers were yet another of the many classes of cruiser designs from the late 1800s and early 1900s. Straddling the admittedly very thin line between protected cruisers, scout cruisers, and early light cruisers, unprotected cruisers were effectively protected cruisers in nearly every way, except for having very little or no protection at all, even lacking the protective deck of most protected cruisers. There was however some room for manoeuvre in these at times sketchy definitions. Some “unprotected” cruisers did feature an armoured deck, but it was regarded as too thin or too small to be worth considering as adequate protection.

Many unprotected cruisers were built during the height of pre-war cruiser production, although the type sharply fell out of favour with improvements in technology and the changing nature of ship design at the turn of the century and especially in the run-up to the First World War. The capability of modern light cruisers to be both fast, lightly-armed and armoured, without entirely sacrificing one characteristic over another made the unprotected cruiser obsolete very quickly. No more would be built and they saw limited service during the First World War and in the years after before most surviving examples were scrapped in the 1920s.