Shipbucket

Okay Bezobrazov,

Here's what I have of the USS Virginia (BB-13) so far. Stay tuned there's more to come.

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French Vice-admiral Louis-René-Madeleine Le Vassor de La Touche, comte de Tréville
The original spelling of my last name is: LaTouche.

Amazing what a few cranes can add.

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French Vice-admiral Louis-René-Madeleine Le Vassor de La Touche, comte de Tréville
The original spelling of my last name is: LaTouche.

IIRC Virginia did receive cage masts so...can't wait for that version

After your great Connecticut and Virginia I sincerly hope you will be doing he Maine Class and the Mississipi Class.

Next stop on our tour will be Virginia with cage masts and then the Maine. It’s like you’re reading my mind.

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French Vice-admiral Louis-René-Madeleine Le Vassor de La Touche, comte de Tréville
The original spelling of my last name is: LaTouche.

Okay, as I've said before, I think she's done. . .

May I present the USS Virginia (BB-12) as she was built, and commissioned 7 May 1906.

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French Vice-admiral Louis-René-Madeleine Le Vassor de La Touche, comte de Tréville
The original spelling of my last name is: LaTouche.

Certainly looks nice, but double-storied towers? Seriously?

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The idea was that since space is at a premium (or rather, a shorter warship is easier to armor, especially with the "all or nothing" armor scheme of pre-dreadnoughts - not to mention the less beam-ier a ship is, the better hull speed it inherits) why not put your smaller turrets on top of the larger ones? Notice I didn't call them "secondaries" - the smaller rifles were meant to engage large warships just as the larger rifles were (the true secondaries are the anti-torpedo boat armament in the casements). This is a gross simplification, but at the time they couldn't make up their minds if volume of short and medium range fire vs. heavy but slow-firing longer range fire was more effective at engaging ships-of-the-line so they said "what the heck with it, try both." Since the small turrets would be aimed at the same targets as the large turrets, why not combine them as well? Each "turret" (really the top ones are more casements as well) had an independent ammo hoist and naturally independent elevation too, but were not able to rotate independently as they were simply boxes on top of other boxes. But as I just said, with the combat doctrine adhered to this was hardly seen as a problem.

And it almost worked very well, but what was a problem was that powder smoke from the bottom turret would interfere with the targeting and crew comfort of the top "turret" so it was only tried in two classes (the Kentucky/Kearsarge pairing and this class, which actually saw a decent number of units commissioned). However, they did come to the conclusion that they would get better utility out of this configuration and compared to the conventional (at the time) configuration if they separated the setup into a true twin-turret scheme, ala superfiring turrets. This was reached at the time when the dual volume of fire and heavy fire concept came to an end in favor of heavy fire only, so they did draw up plans for a ship with heavy superfiring turrets right after the Virginias that would eventually be commissioned as the Mississippi class. Of course, that class reverted back to a true pre-dreadnought style due to the Connecticut being the battleship F-35s of their day (except actually useless) but they designed the South Carolina/Michigan with true superfiring turrets shortly after that.

Nice work.
And interesting - even if weird - double-storied turrets.

As I stated earlier when asked if I would draw th Virginia class, I hate the double turrets they are both ugly and useless. I’ll draw the modernizations and move on, gladly--USS Michigan is my eventual hope .

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French Vice-admiral Louis-René-Madeleine Le Vassor de La Touche, comte de Tréville
The original spelling of my last name is: LaTouche.