Cruiser Buques

For other uses, see Cruiser (disambiguation).

USS Port Royal (CG-73), a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, launched in 1992.
A cruiser is a type of warship. The term has been in use forseveral hundreds of years, and has had different meanings throughout this period. During the Age of Sail, the term cruiser reflected a type of mission – independent scouting, raiding or commerceprotection – fulfilled by a frigate or sloop, which were the cruising warships of a fleet.
From the middle of the 19th century, cruiser came to be a classification for the ships intended for this kind ofrole, though cruisers came in a wide variety of sizes, from the small protected cruiser to armoured cruisers which were as large (though not as powerful) as a battleship.
By the early 20th century,cruisers could be placed on a consistent scale of warship size, smaller than a battleship but larger than a destroyer. In 1922, the Washington Naval Treaty placed a formal limit on cruisers, which weredefined as warships of up to 10,000 tons displacement carrying guns no larger than 8 inches in calibre. These limits shaped cruisers up until the end of World War II. The very large battlecruisers ofthe World War I era were now classified, along with battleships, as capital ships.
In the later 20th century, the obsolescence of the battleship left the cruiser as the largest and most powerfulsurface combatant. The role of the cruiser varied according to ship and navy, often including air defence, commerce raiding and shore bombardment. The U.S. Navy in the Cold War period built guided-missilecruisers primarily designed to provide air defence, while the navy of the USSR built cruisers with heavy anti-ship missiles designed to sink NATO carrier task forces.
Currently only three nations,the United States, Russia, and Peru (BAP Almirante Grau (CLM-81) while still in service with the Peruvian Navy), operate cruisers, though the line between cruisers and destroyers is once again...