Vauban-class ironclad
The Vauban class, sometimes referred to as the Duguesclin class, was a pair of two ironclad barbette ships built for the French Navy in the late 1870s and 1880s. The class consisted of , the lead ship, and . They were based on the ironclad , adopting the same general arrangement, but were scaled down in size. They were intended for use overseas in the French colonial empire, and as such, they retained a sailing rig for long-range cruising and copper sheathing for their hulls to protect them when they would be unable to be dry-docked regularly. They carried a main battery of four guns that were mounted in individual barbettes; two were in sponsons forward, abreast of the conning tower, and the other two were on the centerline aft. Despite the Navy's intention to use them overseas, both members of the class served with the Mediterranean Squadron for the majority of their careers, from the 1880s to the mid-1890s. They were occupied with peacetime training exercises, and in 1893, they were reduced to the Reserve Division of the squadron. They were laid up after 1895, and Duguesclin saw no further active service, being struck from the naval register in 1904 and sold to ship breakers the following year. Vauban was recommissioned in 1898 for a tour in French Indochina, briefly serving as a divisional flagship, before being stationed in Saigon from 1899 to 1905. After being struck from the register that year, she served as a depot ship, first for torpedo boats and then for submarines from 1905 to 1914, before ultimately being sold in 1919. Design The Vauban class of barbette ships, sometimes known as the Duguesclin class, was designed in the late 1870s as part of a naval construction program that began under the post-Franco-Prussian War fleet plan of 1872. At the time, the French Navy categorized its capital ships as high-seas ships for the main fleet, station ironclads for use in the French colonial empire, and smaller coastal defense ships. The Vauban class was intended to serve in the second role, and they were in most respects similar to the preceding of station ironclads. Both designs were based on the high-seas ironclad , albeit a scaled-down version. The Vauban design, which had been prepared by Victorin Sabattier and Alfred Lebelin de Dionne, differed from the Bayards in several significant respects. First, the designers abandoned the traditional wooden hull in favor of composite iron-and-steel construction, which had been under evaluation for several years. Second, they replaced the three-masted full-ship rig with a two-masted brig rig; this permitted the stern-most main battery gun to fire directly astern, which allowed them to remove the stern chase gun mounted in the earlier vessels. Lebelin de Dionne submitted the plans on 30 November 1876, and they were approved by Léon Martin Fourichon, the French Naval Minister, on 26 December. Characteristics The ships of the Vauban class were long at the waterline, long between perpendiculars, and long overall. They had a beam