Courageous-class battlecruiser

The Courageous class was a group of three Royal Navy warships built during the First World War as so-called large light cruisers, nominally to support Admiral Fisher's Baltic Project of landing troops on the German Baltic coast. They were fast and shallow in draught but very lightly armoured with only a few heavy guns, and they were the first large Royal Navy warships to use geared steam turbines and small-tube boilers. Courageous and Glorious spent the war patrolling the North Sea, while their half-sister Furious was altered during construction to carry a flying-off deck in place of a forward turret. Harland and Wolff at Belfast built Glorious, laid down in May 1915 and launched in April 1916. After the war all three were laid up and then rebuilt as aircraft carriers during the 1920s; Courageous and Glorious were sunk early in the Second World War and Furious was sold for scrap in 1948.