Shipbucket

Presenting to you one of the, if not the, weirdest Italian ship proposal I have ever seen: the unknown proposal by General Ferrati, known for the "F" and "G" proposals. Unlike "F" and "G," this one is not even close to being conventional. This ship sports two main turrets, which have been said to mount 5 12" guns in a strange arrangement - three would be mounted at the bottom, while two would be up top. It has also been said that it would have been a more "reasonable" mount of only 4 guns, which can be seen here:



I did my best to model my drawing to the only image of the proposal on the internet, which is this terribly scanned page from an unknown book:



The armament of the ship is:

2 x Quad or quintuple mount 12" gun turrets
4 x Triple mount 4.7" guns
6 x Single mount 76mm deck guns

Her engine power and speed are unknown, same with her armour belts. I would assume this would have similar armour to a contemporary Italian BB of the time, but it may have been chosen as a battlecruiser and given better speed. We may never know!

Nevertheless, here is my interpretation (thanks to the Lord of Italian Ships, Karle94, for suggestions during the process!):

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That is one of the biggest WTF design

When I saw it, I immediately knew I had to get on it before someone else did!

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It's an interesting design, that's for certain, and you did an excellent job portraying it. However, I would not want to be a crewman on that ship; the potential for a catastrophic turret explosion would be - I imagine - fairly high.

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MS State Guard - 08 March 2014 - 28 January 2023

The Official IJN Ships & Planes List

#FJB

Utterly crazy concept, but a great drawing.

Honestly I think the 4 gun version might actually be even less reasonable than the 5 gun, simply because the guns are directly on top of each other and thus would have to elevate in unison for the lower barrels not to collide with the upper ones.