SMS Elbing was a light cruiser ordered by the Imperial Russian navy under the name Admiral Nevelskoy from the Schichau-Werke shipyard in Danzig in 1913. Following the outbreak of World War I, the ship was confiscated in August 1914 and launched on 21 November 1914 as SMS Elbing. She had one sister ship, , the lead ship of their class. The ship was commissioned into the High Seas Fleet in September 1915. She was armed with a main battery of eight 15 cm SK L/45 guns and had a top speed of . Elbing participated in only two major operations during her career. The first, the bombardment of Yarmouth and Lowestoft, occurred in April 1916; there, she briefly engaged the British Harwich Force. A month later, she took part in the Battle of Jutland, where she scored the first hit of the engagement. She was heavily engaged in the confused fighting on the night of 31 May – 1 June, and shortly after midnight she was accidentally rammed by the battleship , which tore a hole in the ship's hull. Flooding disabled the ship's engines and electrical generators, rendering her immobilized and without power. At around 02:00, a German torpedo boat took off most of her crew, and an hour later the remaining men scuttled the ship; they escaped in the ship's cutter and were later picked up by a Dutch steamer. Design Elbing was long overall and had a beam of and a draft of forward. She displaced at full load. Her propulsion system consisted of two sets of Marine steam turbines driving two propellers. They were designed to give . These were powered by six coal-fired Yarrow water-tube boilers, and four oil-fired Yarrow boilers. These gave the ship a top speed of . Elbing carried of coal, and an additional of oil that gave her a range of approximately at . Elbing had a standard crew of twenty-one officers and 421 enlisted men, though this was expanded in wartime. The ship was armed with eight SK L/45 guns in single pedestal mounts. Two were placed side by side forward on the forecastle, four were located amidships, two on either side, and two were side by side aft. She also carried four SK L/55 anti-aircraft guns, though these were replaced with a pair of two SK L/45 anti-aircraft guns. She was also equipped with a pair of torpedo tubes