King George V class battleships

Hello everyone!

The four british battleships approved under the FY 1910 estimates became the King George V class. They were originally to become repeat Orions, then proto-Iron Dukes; in the end, they turned out something in between. They abandoned the weird foremast arrangement of the Orions in favour of a pole mast stepped in front of the forefunnel, giving them a foretop platform you could actually use; they were however the last british battleships with 102mm secondaries, 152mm ones being considered but not fitted to keep displacement and cost under control.

Although this class was supposed to receive fire control directors for the first time in British warship design, the class ship HMS King George V differed from the others by having a foremast layout that did not allow to mount a director straight away. When she joined the fleet in November 1912, she was painted in a very dark shade of gray (a source called it charcoal gray) that seems to have been standard for home-based British warships in the last years before the first world war.
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HMS Centurion's mast was fitted for, but not with a director when completed. She further differed from all her sisters by having a different searchlight layout.
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The other two units of the class were - as far as I can tell anyway - virtually identical and impossible to tell apart. HMS Ajax received the main artillery director from the start, but its weight caused the foremast to vibrate in an alarming way, so she received struts to strenghten it. These were attached relatively low, only halfway up the mast, but seemed to have worked.
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HMS Audacious looked exactly like Ajax; photographic evidence however indicates that she was already painted in 'battleship gray', a much lighter shade than was usual pre-war, but still darker than the contemporary German paintjob, which became standard late in 1914 (according to one source, not because the dark shade did not work camouflage-wise, but because the pigments to make it were running low). She was the first British battleship loss during the first world war, hitting a single mine off North Ireland and slowly sinking despite intense efforts to save her.
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The above drawings represent what I was able to find out about these ships in their initial guise; whoever knows more, please dump it on me.

Later modifications will be shown on this thread as well. But although I think I know quite well what alterations they received during their service, I mostly could not pinpoint when exactly the modifications were made (especially when exactly the masts were shortened and the torpedo nets landed). Anyone with firm knowledge about these matters please step forward, so I can represent their later fit as faithfully as possible. The same goes for the exact hue of the pre-war very dark gray; the one shown here is only an educated guess.

Greetings
GD

Wow, what can I say...
Awesome-looking drawings of awesome-looking ships as usual, and I mean both in every sense of the word.
The work on the complete class is impressive, all the more so with century-old subjects.

Still, let it not be said that I would leave a top-notch post like that without at least one stylistic nitpick

Maybe more of a question actually: in the early charcoal-gray versions, a lot of separation lines between joined surfaces appear to be black. I'm thinking about the vertical lines on the stacks, the bridge wings and the sorta-bridge-wings on what is probably the reserve conning tower for the aft battery. Are these only near-black because of the darker color scheme?

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Excellent work, these are very well drawn and coloured.

I don't have encyclopaedic knowledge of these ships and their refits, the bulk of work was probably after Jutland (I know the aft casemates were removed early in the war).
Generally the KGVs seem to have been overlooked in history by the Iron Dukes and the 15in gunned series that succeeded them and of course Audacious' loss was kept a secret.
DK Brown's opinion was that the 4in secondary battery was preferable and superior to the 6in battery that became the subsequent norm, though Iron Duke's layout was probably helped by the extra 25ft length given how cramped the KGVs were (the foremast position being crammed in).

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Absolutely top-notch work.

I don't have the specific knowledge to say anything else, so I'll limit myself to the drawings themselves:
Simply excellent.

Absolutely awesome, stunning!!! Well worth the wait!

The drawings are very good GD.

The only thing I have from pictorial evidence is the director unit you have coming out of the foretop of Ajax and Audacious should be a bout 50% thicker. Unfortunately I can not send you the scans at present as we ('"I") are remodeling the computer room. Once finished and the scanner connected, I will send you a PM of what I have.

A search online of HMS Audacious and HMS Ajax does have a couple of pics that support the slightly bigger foretop/director. Worth a look anyway.

Wow...I can only say that you appear to have hit the head of the nail, GD! Jolly Good Work! Please carry on!

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King George V class battleships

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