SMS ("His Majesty's Ship Wörth") was one of four German pre-dreadnought battleships of the , built in the early 1890s. The class also included , , and . The ships were the first ocean-going battleships built for the Kaiserliche Marine (Imperial Navy). was laid down at the Germaniawerft dockyard in Kiel in May 1890. The ship was launched on 6 August 1892 and commissioned into the fleet on 31 October 1893. and her three sisters carried six heavy guns rather than four, as was standard for most other navies' battleships. She was named for the Battle of Wörth fought during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. served in the German fleet for the first decade of her career, participating in the normal peacetime routine of training cruises and exercises. She took part in the German naval expedition to China in 1900 to suppress the Boxer Uprising; by the time the fleet arrived the siege of Peking had already been lifted, and saw little direct action in China. She was placed in reserve in 1906 as newer, more powerful vessels had supplanted the class as front-line battleships. Obsolete by the start of World War I, and served in a limited capacity in the Imperial German Navy as coastal defense ships for the first two years of the war; they did not see action. By 1916, was reduced to a barracks ship, a role in which she served until the end of hostilities. Despite plans to convert her into a freighter after the war, was scrapped in Danzig in 1919. Design was the fourth of four s, the first pre-dreadnought battleships of the (Imperial Navy). Prior to the ascension of Kaiser Wilhelm II to the German throne in June 1888, the German fleet had been largely oriented toward defense of the German coastline and Leo von Caprivi, chief of the (Imperial Naval Office), had ordered a number of coastal defense ships in the 1880s. In August 1888, the Kaiser, who had a strong interest in naval matters, replaced Caprivi with (VAdm—Vice Admiral) Alexander von Monts and instructed him to include four battleships in the 1889–1890 naval budget. Monts, who favored a fleet of battleships over the coastal defense strategy emphasized by his predecessor, cancelled the last four coastal defense ships authorized under Caprivi and instead ordered four battleships. Though they were the first modern battleships built in Germany, presaging the Tirpitz-era High Seas