Protected Cruiser IRN Admiral Kornilov

[Brian James]

Protected Cruiser IRN Admiral Kornilov pictured in the Gulf of Finland c1906.She was laid down in 1886 and launched in 1887 at St. Nazaire. She was commissioned in 1888. Admiral Kornilov was 371 ft long and 49 ft wide, had a draught of 26 ft and featured a large ram bow. She displaced 5,863 tonnes.Her armament consisted of fourteen 6-inch /40 cal guns, six 3-pounders and ten 1-pounders plus six 15-inch torpedo tubes. During a refit in 1904/05 the main armament was changed to ten 6-inch /45 cal guns.The deck armour was between 1 to 2.5 inches, the armour at the command tower was 3 inches. Two horizontal triple-expansion steam engines with eight boilers gave her 5,977 ihp and a top speed of 17.6 knots. She had two shafts and a bunker capacity of 1,000 tons of coal. The crew numbered 479 men.
She was unique to the Russian Navy but resembled the large Protected Cruisers Tage and Amiral Cécille built at the same time for the French Navy. These were unusually long Cruisers at the time, although surpassed in 1892 by the British Blake Class.
She was used as a Torpedo Training ship from 1908 and was stricken from the active list in 1911.