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Roon-class cruiser

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Roon-class cruiser (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

As of 21 April 2025, 22:19 (UTC), this page is active and open for discussion. An FAC coordinator will be responsible for closing the nomination.
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Nominator(s): Parsecboy (talk) 10:31, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

This article covers a pair of armored cruisers built by Imperial Germany in the early 1900s, one of which was sunk during World War I. This article is part of the Armored cruisers of Germany Featured Topic, and should this article pass, it will be one step along the way to turn all of the icons into stars. It passed a MILHIST A-class review last month, so it should be in good shape. Thanks to all who take the time to review the article. Parsecboy (talk) 10:31, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

UC

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A few comments after a read-through from someone who knows almost nothing about warships. I enjoyed the article: it's clearly written from a place of huge knowledge, and on the whole was clear and engaging throughout.

  • The two ships served in I Scouting Group, the reconnaissance force of the High Seas Fleet, after they entered service in 1905–1906: the High Seas Fleet didn't exist until 1907, which does not sit well with this or, later, On entering service, Yorck joined I Scouting Group, the reconnaissance squadron of the High Seas Fleet.
    • This is a fair point - the fleet existed, just under the name Heimatflotte - I've created a redirect from that name and updated the article accordingly
  • the group flagship and the deputy commander flagship: this may be navy-speak, but should this be deputy commander's flagship?
    • Probably just an oversight, since I used the possessive further down in the article.
  • By the early 1910s, the first German battlecruisers had begun to enter service and Roon was decommissioned in 1911: we need to split this sentence: Roon was not decommissioned in 1911 by the early 1910s.
    • "By the early 1900s" refers to when the battlecruisers entered service
      • Yes, this is a grammar problem: as phrased, it governs the whole sentence, but we want it only to govern the first clause. Accordingly, we need something like By the early 1910s, the first German battlecruisers had begun to enter service: Roon was decommissioned in 1911.
        • Sentences are split
  • n armored cruisers for both service overseas in Germany's colonial empire and as scouts for the main battle fleet in German waters: I think we can do without overseas here, which made me scratch my head a little (don't ships by definition operate overseas?)
    • "overseas" as opposed to in home waters, but I suppose it's redundant, since Germany had no colonies in Europe at the time
  • The design for the new ships, completed in 1901, were slight improvements over the Prinz Adalberts,: singular, not plural, needed here (and probably a slight rewrite). I'm not convinced about the mixed languages and fonts of "Prinz Adalberts": suggest keeping it singular as "the Prinz Adalbert class".
    • Rewored - take a look now
  • which necessitated a longer hull and provided an increase by about 2,028 metric horsepower (2,000 ihp): an increase of what? It would be useful to know what it was increasing from, as well: was this a marginal gain or a massive one?
    • Added a note
  • length to breadth ratio: hyphens: "length-to-breadth ratio" (compound modifier).
    • Good catch
  • The Roon-class ships shared many of the same layout characteristics as the contemporary German pre-dreadnought battleships: slightly mixed constructions: we either want shared many layout characteristics with or had many of the same layout characteristics as.
    • Fixed
  • And as with all of the preceding German armored cruisers, they received less armor protection than their opposite numbers in the British fleet: it's not strictly verboten to start a sentence with "and", but here I think it jars and adds little: would advise cutting.
    • Removed
  • Further, they suffered the same fate as many pre-dreadnought type vessels completed in the mid-1900s, having been rendered obsolescent by the advent of all-big-gun warships like the British battlecruiser Invincible, launched in 1907.: there seems to be an elephant in the room we're not directly mentioning here?
    • They're different ship types with different roles - Dreadnought did not render armored cruisers obsolete, only Invincible did that
  • the follow-on Scharnhorst class, which proved to be far better fighting ships, more than a match for their British counterparts: I think it might help to be explicit about what we mean by "counterparts": you surely don't mean Invincible, for example?
    • No, their counterparts would have been the last generation of British armored cruisers - but Dodson doesn't say specifically which class he's referring to (and the British built several during the period in question).
  • There's a lot of technical terminology in the first paragraph of "General characteristics and machinery". This isn't a problem per se, but I think it might help non-expert readers to have a little explanation of, for example, the point of having watertight compartments and a double bottom. This article section is rapidly becoming my gold standard for explaining detailed material without becoming simplistic.
    • I don't think I agree (and I don't really think the Preston article should go that far into detail on background information); FA criterion #4 states that articles should be "focused on the main topic without going into unnecessary detail". Part of the benefits of an online encyclopedia is that readers can follow the links if they don't understand what a double bottom means, or how displacement is calculated.
      • Right, but FA criterion #2 includes "It follows the style guidelines": WP:GENAUD has "An article may disappoint because it is written well above the reading ability of the reader, because it wrongly assumes the reader is familiar with the subject or field, or because it covers the topic at too basic a level or is not comprehensive", and MOS:NOFORCELINK has "Use a link when appropriate, but as far as possible do not force a reader to use that link to understand the sentence". I don't think we need necessarily to explain what a double bottom is, but it would, I think, be helpful to explain briefly why you would want to add one to a ship.
        • But then you get back to the SYNTH problem; no references discuss general topics like a double bottom with regard for a specific ship. Even though it should be relatively innocuous to state something along the lines of "Roon had watertight compartments and a double bottom.[1] Watertight compartments and double bottoms are used to contain flooding in the event of a hull breach.[2]", it's still synthetic to take unrelated sources and put them together to make a point.
          • Here I disagree (or at least, I disagree that it's bad) -- if you follow that logic to its conclusion, we can't join any two facts unless a source has joined them in exactly the same way, and so every article must either fail WP:CLOP or WP:SYNTH. We have a different audience to most publications, and it stands to reason that we would explain things that academic works for an expert audience would consider obvious. However, I do take your point that summary style is part of the FA criteria, while clarity and comprehensibility aren't, as long as the prose is professional in quality -- and that it certainly is. UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:28, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • the ships lost up to 60 percent speed: of their speed? Again, possibly naval-ese (on which see WP:JARGON), but we wouldn't say "the car gained double speed" in my dialect of English at least.
    • Added
  • The ships' casemates were placed too low, and as a result they were exceedingly wet, which rendered them impossible to use in heavy seas.: is that a retrospective comment on the design, or did someone mess up at the shipyard? What does "exceedingly wet" mean in this context, exactly?
    • It was a very common problem of just about all countries' navies at the time, so not a particular person's screw up. "Exceedingly wet" means water could easily splash into the casemate openings (to say something is "wet" is a bit of naval-ese)
      • OK -- I think it should be clarified that "The ships' casemates were placed too low" is talking about the design, rather than that the fitters placed them lower than the naval architects intended them to.
        • Done
  • drove one of the ships' three screws.: with the apostrophe here, it sounds as if the ships had three screws between them.
    • Reworded slightly
  • The central screw was 4.50 m (14 ft 9 in) in diameter, and the outer screws were 4.80 m (15 ft 9 in). Steam was provided to the engines by sixteen coal-fired water-tube boilers built by Düsseldorf-Ratinger Röhrenkesselfabrik (Dürr). Each boiler had 4 fireboxes for a total of 64. The boilers were ducted into four funnels. The propulsion system produced 19,000 ihp (14,200 kW), which had a rated top speed of 22 knots (41 km/h), though on trials neither ship reached that figure, with Roon making 21.1 knots (39.1 km/h; 24.3 mph) and Yorck only 20.4 knots (37.8 km/h; 23.5 mph). The ships had four turbo generators, which provided 260 kilowatts at 110 volts: again, a lot of technical details which don't give the reader much to contextualise them, or much of a clue as to what they should take away about them. I find myself asking "was that a lot?" throughout. Footnote a, interestingly, does a very good job of contextualising a similarly unintuitive measurement.
    • The trouble is, it's hard to put most of these things in context without veering into synthesis; I could very easily cite figures for other ships of the era, which would make it easier for readers to compare them, but that's a bit closer to WP:SYNTH that I'd like to go.
  • The forward conning tower had 150 mm (5.9 in) thick sides and a 30 mm (1.2 in) thick roof: these measurements should be hyphenated, as they are adjectival in apposition.
  • At the waterline, their armored belt was 100 mm (3.9 in) thick amidships where the ships' vitals were located: with apologies for repeating myself, I would like to know whether this was a lot.
    • Same as above; and these sorts of comparisons are more difficult than just measuring thicknesses. There were different types of steel used, different arrangements of armor protection, etc. And it inevitably leads to Top Trumps comparisons, which isn't really helpful in understanding a particular ship design.
  • By this time, Roon had been disarmed: this comes out of the blue: we haven't yet put the ships on the water, as far as the article's narrative is concerned. I wonder if this section would be better moved down to the end of the service history, especially as these changes never actually happened?
    • I get the point, but I generally don't like to mix technical details with the narrative section.
  • Capitalisation: why "raid on Yarmouth" but " Battle of the Åland Islands"?
    • Fixed
  • on returning to Wilhelmshaven on the night of 3 November, the ships encountered heavy fog and were forced to anchor in the Schillig roadstead outside the port to avoid running into the defensive minefields there. Yorck's commander decided that visibility had improved enough to enter the port, but in the haze he led the ship into one of the minefields. : if it's possible, it would be useful to have an indication of when he did this.
    • Do you mean a specific time?
      • Or at least a vague one: did the other ships anchor there, and Roon, push on, or did the captain wait for a couple of hours while the fog lifted, decide that it had lifted enough, and prove himself wrong?
        • Clarified
  • with a joint Army-Navy assault: endash, not hyphen. We should probably also decapitalise and consider a rephrase -- do we mean that the Navy actually assaulted Libau, or did they provide support from the sea to army troops who did the assaulting?
    • Done
  • Design work commenced in 1916 to convert the ship into a seaplane tender: this contradicts the date of 1918 given further up (but see my comment there about combining these two subsections).
    • Corrected
  • the war ended before the project could be carried out, so the ship was stricken from the naval register on 25 November 1920: it may just be clumsy phrasing, but this is a non sequitur: we can't draw a straight casual line from "the war ended" (in 1918) to "so the ship was stricken" (two years later). Why did it sit around for two years?
    • Added a bit of context (namely, the Treaty of Versailles)
  • Tucker 2005 is missing place of publication.
    • Added
  • Taylor 1970 was published before the introduction of ISBN-13, so should have a 10-digit ISBN.
    • ISBNs can be converted from one format to another, and in my experience, preference at FAC is to standardize on one format.
      • We have different experiences at FAC: WP:ISBN has Please use the ISBN-13 if both are provided by the original work. The ISBN-13 is often found near the barcode and will start with either 978- or 979-. However, if an older work only lists an ISBN-10, use that in citations instead of calculating an ISBN-13 for it.
  • By early 1915, it had become clear to the German naval command that older vessels like Roon were insufficiently armored to take part in an action with the powerful British Grand Fleet,: Scheer puts it very slightly differently: he says " The Third Scouting Division, which contained the oldest armoured cruisers ... had long since been handed over to the commander of the Baltic forces, as, owing to their lack of speed and inferior armour plating, the vessels were not suitable for use in the North Sea". He doesn't explicitly mention the Grand Fleet here, but I think it's a reasonable inference.
    • In context, it could really only mean the Grand Fleet; it was the only game going in the North Sea, aside from (from Scheer's perspective inconsequential) light forces in the Channel (and with which Roon wouldn't have had much trouble).
  • The copyright on File:NH 92713.jpg does not look good to me. We have an explanation that "most" of the images in its colleciton are free from known copyright restrictions, but that isn't quite good enough. The last known source is someone who was in a position to give it in 1981, so we're about 45 years tops PMA, and it was taken c. 1914, so absent publication information, it isn't PD in the United States. Assuming it was taken in Germany, copyright expires 70 years after production for an unpublished, anonymous work, but we don't actually know for sure that this is the country of origin.
    • We've always relied on the NHHC disclaimer in cases like this. It's basically impossible to track down the original photograph, so we have to use the information available to us. But @Nikkimaria: may want to comment, since she's regarded as one of the foremost copyright experts on the site.

UndercoverClassicist T·C 21:40, 4 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks UC, your comments have been very helpful. Parsecboy (talk) 14:03, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you: a few replies above. In the other cases, I'm generally happy or at least happy to agree to disagree -- in particular, I do take your point on the difficulty of contextualising e.g. speeds and armour plates without going into SYNTH. UndercoverClassicist T·C 14:59, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Support, assuming that all comes back OK on the image licensing (and if it doesn't, that any problem there is fixed) -- we disagree on a few things, but you've got solid reasons for doing things your way, and those deserve to be respected. It's clearly an excellent article and a worthy addition to the long list of warship FAs. UndercoverClassicist T·C 19:28, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks again, and just so we're clear (since it can be difficult to judge tone on the internet), I appreciate you pushing me in this review - it can be easy to become complacent on these things, and we all need to be challenged from time to time. Parsecboy (talk) 19:56, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support by Chetsford

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What an excellent article! Aside from UndercoverClassicist's comments, I support with the following additional (but merely suggestive) comments that can be actioned or ignored at the nominator's discretion.

  • The lead seems incredibly long for an article of this length (392 words). While it comes just under the 400-word maximum suggested, but not mandated, by WP:LEADLENGTH, the article itself is concise enough that it feels a bit "off".
    • It's tough, since I don't know exactly what could be trimmed without losing the key details of the topic
  • "for both service overseas in Germany's colonial empire and as scouts for the main battle fleet in German waters" For clarity, this might be better represented as "for service both overseas ..."
    • Done
  • "provided an increase by" I think (?) of is the correct preposition here, not by.
    • I think you're right
  • "Roon and Yorck were powered by the same engine system as the preceding class, three 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion engines, each of which drove one of the ships' three screws." I think a colon instead of a comma might work better after "class" but this also might simply be a question of personal preference. I had to double-check the use of colons for non-lists and it doesn't appear to be a hard or fast rule that they must be used for explanatory statements [1].
    • I think that reads better with the colon

I'm sorry I don't have more comments. I attribute that to the thoroughness and excellence of Jackyd101's GA review. Chetsford (talk) 02:23, 5 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Chetsford! Parsecboy (talk) 19:22, 6 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Image review

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Support from Gerda

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I meant to list criticism here but reached the end without complaints. I made a few changes to image placement, - feel free to revert, of course. The very last sentence doesn't quite belong under "World War I" but doesn't need an extra section ;) --Gerda Arendt (talk) 13:46, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Support from Gog the Mild

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Recusing to review.

  • "the ships had comparatively light armament and thin armor protection". Compared to what? If the Prinz Adalbert-class cruisers then this doesn't seem to be the case. If foreign armored cruisers then the sentence structure is not perhaps as clear as it could be. (Eg, both "comparatively" and "compared" in the same sentence.)
    • The latter - does changing "comparatively" to "relatively" help?
It would. 'The ships' relatively light armament and thin armor protection compared poorly with their foreign contemporaries, particularly the armored cruisers of their primary opponent, the British Royal Navy.' would be even better.
Works for me.
I note that this hasn't been changed ...
Apparently I forgot to actually save the edit (which I had done at work the other day and gotten distracted - so I had to log back in to my remote desktop to actually save the page!)
My usual self sabotage is having too many windows open at once.
  • What do you mean by "their primary opponent"?
    • The German fleet was being built more or less directly to challenge the Royal Navy
Then something like 'their potential opponent, the British Royal Navy.' or 'their anticipated opponent, the British Royal Navy.' seems to fit better.
Done
  • "Though the additional boilers were meant to increase the ships' speed, both vessels failed to reach their designed top speed." So did the additional boilers succeed in increasing the ships' speed compared with the Prinz Adalbert-class cruisers?
    • Yes, it did increase their speed compared to the Prinz Adalbert design, though those ships also failed to reach their design speed (I don't know that we want to get too far into the weeds in the lead)
Those additional boilers are explicitly additional to the number in the Prinz Adalbert-class cruisers, so either don't mention them again, or - better - tell the readers whether they did their job. Whether the ships met their design speed is something else - perhaps they failed this by half a knot but were 5 knots faster than the Adalberts?
Added to the body, but I don't want to get that far into the weeds in the introduction.
  • "Both ships were reactivated after World War I broke out in July 1914." Were both ships reactivated in July? I note that the main article uses a slightly different wording.
    • The war broke out in July - the ships were mobilized after that (being recommissioned in August once crews were assembled)
Then maybe use the same wording you do in the main article?
Reworded with a bit more specificity
  • "tasked with screening for the main body of the German fleet." Possibly this works in US English, but could I interest you in 'tasked with screening the main body of the German fleet.'?
    • You could ;)

More to follow. Gog the Mild (talk) 16:49, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Gog! Parsecboy (talk) 20:15, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • "three 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion engines, each of which drove the ships' three screws." Just checking that you don't mean '... each of which drove one of the ships' three screws.'?
    • Lot of threes in that sentence - should be read to mean 1 engine per screw. Would it be easier to say "three 3-cylinder vertical triple expansion engines, each of which drove a screw"?
Good point, and yes, it would.
Done
  • "Reconnaissance Forces of the Baltic". Worth a red link?
    • I don't know - de.wiki has a section in their overarching article on the scouting forces of the Imperial fleets (which we also lack). It's obscure enough that I don't know that it has a standard translation in English, so I'm somewhat hesitant to impose one
Ok.

That's it from me. Nice to see it again. Gog the Mild (talk) 21:21, 9 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Source review

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Are we sure that an all-English sourcing on a German ship class isn't leaving any important source out? What's the logic between linking some sources to the Internet Archive and others not? What's the "Naval Records Club"? Does "Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe: Biographien – ein Spiegel der Marinegeschichte von 1815 bis zur Gegenwart" not have an ISBN OCLC or other identifier? I am pretty sure I have seen many of these publishers in other FACses and the formatting seems consistent. Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 06:49, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Die Deutschen Kriegsschiffe certainly isn't English ;) (and Gröner is a translation of a German book, by the way). As for the ISBN/OCLC number, for some reason, Vol. 8 doesn't show up in Worldcat, and the hard copy I have doesn't have an ISBN included.
The links were added piecemeal by multiple editors over the years, but I haven't bothered to dig up the rest. I don't know how useful they are for the non-PD sources anyway.
The Naval Records Club was the original name for the International Naval Research Organization. Parsecboy (talk) 19:59, 10 April 2025 (UTC)[reply]
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