Posts:2493 Joined: May 15th, 2011, 5:10 am
Location: NE Tasmania
I wanted to see if what a 10,000 tonne displacement battleship looked like if the Germans tried to conform to the treaty (even through they probably could not have been able to make these even in 1922). So I ran the numbers through Springsharp and came up with the following
At a block coefficient of 0.800, she looks like one of the tugboat barges I so often see out on the Tombigbee. Not precisely an ideal hullform for a warship- your battleship will have a hull shaped like a supertanker.
Posts:2493 Joined: May 15th, 2011, 5:10 am
Location: NE Tasmania
Yeah They will be quite like the Deutschland class,except:
*8.5 knots slower
*much more heavily armoured (nearly double)
*6500km range (they would only roam the North sea and the Baltic)
*100 feet shorter,3.5 feet thinner, 7.5 feet shallower
and probably older control systems etc
Not sure for a name, "Weimar" probably wouldn't do
The speed would be far, far more useful than a 10" armor belt that's only 12' high.
I'd go with protection against a 6" opponent, and try to squeeze out as much speed as possible. Then you start seeing the necessity for a 'disproportionate commitment' on your enemy's part; you have a cruiser with extremely big guns and decent armor... you need a battlecruiser or a cruiser squadron to kill it, and unlike the Deutschland it will be hard for most cruisers to catch. Heck, I might even drop down to 2x2x280mm and give her a respectable secondary of 12x1x150mm. Or, you could potentially recycle some of the old 170mm/L40 guns from the old pre-dreads as secondaries (as a cost-saving measure) since these ships would be mostly for use against merchants.
Actually, since the 'modern' version of the 280mm doesn't exist as of 1924, I'd figure that the main battery would also have to be scavenged off the old pre-dreads as well... again, call it 'cost-saving' measure in a nation that is probably rather opposed to any major military spending.
What I am saying is that the Deutschland was too great a compromise- too slow to outrun a cruiser which could sink her, and too lightly armed and armored to fight a battlecruiser... which she could not escape. Germany would either need a linienschiffe made to fight a battleship, or a commerce raider which could keep pace with a cruiser. The Deutschland tried to be both... and achieved neither.