Torpilleur No209

This is another Shadowless concept art, the finalised design for the French flying destroyers. Like their British counterparts I tried to make my design as "national" as possible, a fact facilitated by the fact that French torpedo-boats of the era were indeed pretty distinctive.
In real life, since the French Jeune École ("Young School") of ship warfare emphasised the use of small torpedo boats over larger cruisers and ships of the line, they produced a lot and thus never bothered to name them beyond giving them a number. For my design I kept this practice and also adopted the real life numbering conventions, including actual font and the brass plaque affixed to the funnels.

Unlike the British Destroyers, which in the Shadowless universe are based on the work of John Thornycroft, the French ships are based around the hydrofoil designs of Italian engineer Enrico Forlanini, who also experimented with hydrofoils around 1898 in real life.

In terms of paint schemes, the first two liveries closely mimic those used in real life by French Navy small craft around the turn of the century (larger ships had black hulls, buff superstructures and red marking their water lines) as well as the all grey livery used during WW1. The third painting scheme is a fictional camouflage loosely based on the real life tank camo used by the French in the interwar era.

In real life, torpedo boat Nr.209 belonged to the "type 37m" class also known as "dos de chameau" (camel hump), capable of attaining 26 knots (using conventional triple-expansion engines rather than turbines) and was built in 1898 by Bordeaux based shipyard "Ateliers et Chantier de la Gironde".