Thiaria: Other People's ships

Garlicdesign

Post subject: Re: Thiaria: Other People's ships

Posted: March 10th, 2016, 8:39 pm

Posts: 1071
Joined: December 26th, 2012, 9:36 am
Location: Germany

Hello again!

The next one is more or less a study in camouflage; the ships themselves do not significantly vary from the originals:

15. The largest of their kind: Lützow and Seydlitz
The magnificient heavy cruisers Blücher and Goeben (the latter was renamed Prinz Eugen shortly after launch to celebrate the Anschluss of Austria) were large, strikingly handsome ships, but they had multiple shortcomings. For their size, neither their armament nor their protection was impressive, and their engines were unreliable fuel hogs. On the plus side, they had the most complete fire control equipment ever mounted on a cruiser so far and were good sea boats (by German standards) with comfortable accomodation. The follow-on batch, laid down in 1937, was modified to make better use of the large size of the basic design, incorporating more armour, more weapons and more fuel. The useless torpedo bulkhead (with a thickness of only 20mm and a void only two meters wide, it was nothing but a waste of weight) was omitted and the thickness of the side armour was increased to 100mm. The decks, which had a thickness of 30+30mm in Blücher, were re-arranged to move weight downwards in the hull and had 20+50mm on the next two. The most visible alteration was the armament; at the cost of 500 tons added weight, the A and Y twin turrets were replaced with triples. Although it had been hoped to accomodate these improvements on the original hulls, this proved impossible, and the hulls were lengthened to a LOA of 215 meters; standard displacement now exceeded 15.000 tons, with a full load displacement of 20.200 tons. As the original turbines were retained, speed dropped by half a knot to 32 knots; due to the use of improved boilers with somewhat reduced working pressure, the engines were more reliable. The provision of much larger oil bunkerage increased designed range from 6.800 to 8.500 miles at 19 knots. Except as mentioned above, the other particulars (light flak, airplanes, torpedoes) were identical with Blücher and Prinz Eugen. The ships were both launched in 1940 and completed in 1942; a Soviet proposal to buy both hulls in 1940 was stalled by the German offer to complete them first and became insubstantial after June 1941. The first one was named Lützow and looked like this during her shakedown cruise in the Baltic:

[ img ]

Lützow shared the tendency to burn too much fuel with the first batch; effective range was slightly more than 6.000 miles. Seydlitz on the other hand performed as advertised and was generally considered very reliable, which made her unique among German heavy cruisers. Outwardly, they were identical, but Seydlitz was the first German ship to carry the new M41 69-caliber fully automatic 37mm flaks which were still beta in late 1942. During her participation in the raid on Spitzbergen, Seydlitz looked like this:

[ img ]

After suffering damage multiple times and not achieving much, Lützow was lost in the battle of Senja in 1944; at that time, she had also swapped her semi automatic 37mm guns for fully automatic ones and massively augmented her radar and light flak suite. She looked like this on the day of her loss:

[ img ]

Seydlitz was by far the luckier ship; to no one's surprise, she emerged from the war in an undamaged state. She became a British prize and was used for trials, then sunk as a target in 1949; 'credit' for finally sinking her went to the heavy cruiser HMS Albemarle. At the time of her surrender, she looked like this:

[ img ]

Greetings
GD

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