A small vessel, armed with only three light guns, Cyclop served during the three wars of German unification ; during the first, the Second Schleswig War on , she guarded the Prussian coastline but saw no action.
She supported the army's campaign against the Kingdom of Hanover during the Austro-Prussian War of , and she defended the Elbe for the duration of the Franco-Prussian War of β, but again took part in no battles.
Badly deteriorated by , she was stricken from the naval register in March that year and reconstructed into an iron- hulled gunboat. Recommissioned in , she thereafter served abroad in the German colonial empire before being stricken again in She was thereafter used as a storage hulk before ultimately being broken up for scrap after Cyclop was She displaced metric tons long tons at full load.
The ship's crew consisted of 4 officers and 67 enlisted men. She was powered by a single marine steam engine that drove one 3-bladed screw propeller , with steam provided by two coal-fired trunk boilers , which gave her a top speed of 9. As built, she was equipped with a three- masted schooner rig. The ship was armed with a battery of one rifled 15 cm 5. Normally, new ships underwent sea trials upon completion, but budgetary shortages prevented the Prussian Navy from running a thorough examination of the vessel.
Upon arrival, she was laid up. The Prussian Navy planned to reactivate Cyclop in December owing to rising tensions between Prussia and Austria of the German Confederation and Denmark over the latter's November Constitution , which integrated the duchies of Schleswig , Holstein , and Lauenburg with Denmark, a violation of the London Protocol that had ended the First Schleswig War.
