Here's something I'm pretty proud of...
The British Thorneycroft 'R'-class destroyers were laid down 1915-1916 and served in the Great War. There were five:
Radiant, Retriever, Rosalind, Taurus, and
Teazer.
HMS Taurus, 1917, in service with the Royal Navy.
They were armed with three 4-inch guns and two twin 21" torpedo launchers, for a total of four tubes. Some light armament (pom-poms, MGs) was included, and varied from ship to ship. Max speed was ~35 knots.
After the war, they became somewhat superfluous in a Royal Navy already overloaded with war-type destroyers, and they were transferred to the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) in 1920. They kept their old names, only changing their designation to HMAS. Unfornately,
Teazer was run aground and had to be scrapped.
The four remaining Thorneycrofts served the RAN well for the next decade, performing anti-piracy patrols and screening the RAN's capital units (
Tiger and
Australia at the time). But the RAN was beginning to ramp up domestic warship production itself, and had no need of the old warships. They were officially placed on the market in late 1930.
Australia found a buyer in the Armada de Filipinas, the Filipino Navy. The Philippines was a perfect environment for light warship warfare, and the AdF had recently begun converting three of its old
Rabihorcado-class destroyers into destroyer minelayer/sweepers, capable of seeding the Philippines' many channels, inlets and constrained waters with powerful mines. The AdF saw the Thorneycroft Rs as perfect candidates for a similar conversion, being fast, with a long aft deck for storage. The AdF snapped them up, and conversion to minelayers began in mid-1932. The four ships were renamed:
PRS
Págalo, ex-HMAS
Radiant, laid down 1915, converted to DM 1932
PRS
Gavión, ex-HMAS
Retriever, laid down 1916, converted to DM 1932
PRS
Charrán, ex-HMAS
Rosalind, laid down 1915, converted to DM 1932
PRS
Fumarel, ex-HMAS
Taurus, laid down 1916, converted to DM 1932
The rebuild would consist of removing the old 4" weapons, installing a new bridge structure, adding a new twin 75mm dual-purpose gun forward, and replacing the torpedos with an 18" quad mount of Filipino design. An aft storage room was added for mines, as was minesweeping equipment. 35mm and 13.7mm anti-aircraft guns were dotted strategically throughout the ships.
Págalo-class destroyer minelayer/sweeper, after conversion from destroyer in 1933.
