SMS Tiger

SMS Tiger was the third member of the Iltis-class gunboat of gunboats built for the German Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy) in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Other ships of the class were SMS Iltis, SMS Luchs, SMS Eber, SMS Jaguar and SMS Panther.

Design
Tiger was 65.2 m long overall and had a beam of 9.1 m and a draft of 3.56 m forward. She displaced 1108 MT at full load. Her propulsion system consisted of a pair of horizontal triple-expansion steam engines each driving a single screw propeller, with steam supplied by four coal-fired Thornycroft boilers. Tiger could steam at a top speed of 14 kn at 1372 PS. The ship had a cruising radius of about 2580 nmi at a speed of 9 kn. She had a crew of 9 officers and 121 enlisted men. Tiger was armed with a main battery of two 10.5 cm SK L/40 guns, with 482 rounds of ammunition. She also carried six machine guns.

Service history
Tiger was laid down at the Kaiserliche Werft (Imperial Shipyard) in Danzig in 1898. She was launched on 15 August 1899 and commissioned into the German fleet on 3 April 1900.

In August 1904, the badly damaged Russian battleship Tsesarevich and three destroyers sought refuge in the German naval base at Qingdao following the Russian defeat in the Battle of the Yellow Sea. As Germany was neutral, the East Asia Squadron interned Tsesarevich and the destroyers. On 13 August, the Russian ships restocked their coal supplies from three British steamers, but the armored cruiser SMS Fürst Bismarck (1897) and the protected cruiser SMS Hansa cleared for action to prevent them from leaving the port. The two cruisers were joined by Tiger and her sister SMS Luchs and the cruisers SMS Hertha and SMS Geier.

Tiger was scuttled on 29 October 1914 at the German colony in the Jiaozhou Bay Leased Territory during the Siege of Qingdao. Three of her sisters were also scuttled during the siege.