Actually, I think that you really meant to say “Your Nassau class is basically the Queen Elizabeth class” which in fact it is. My Helgoland class is much more than the QE class.
What I meant is that you were introducing the innovations of the Queen Elizabeth class- the concept of the 15in fast battleship. It never occurred to me that you would take a ship which the Royal Navy could only design after seven years and twenty-two dreadnoughts, and give it to the German navy from the start.
If we assume that the OTL Bayern class took a standard 4 years for ‘laid down to commissioned’, then they were laid down just two years later than my POD, and this despite all the ships that were historically built that will not be built ITTL.
Bayern is laid down five years after your point of departure, not two: Wikipedia would have told you this.
So it seems that up gunning is historically accurate (which is why I posited it the way I did), and there seems no reason to suppose that the Germans would not plan accordingly.
How many of those examples of up-gunning are on the part of the German navy? None: even the jump to 15in is to match, not to better, the Royal Navy. That is because, as I said, the Germans are planning to fight in the North Sea where engagement ranges are limited. Hence the larger number of smaller weapons, and also the prioritisation of heavier armour over larger guns when comparing their designs to the Royal Navy.
To design the gun concurrently with the design of the ship means the ship will have to fit a gun whose weight, size, and characteristics you don’t know. This is not an easy undertaking, as the turret will have to fit perfectly into the ship without leaking and cope with the bending and flexing forces put on the ship by the North Sea. Rear Admiral Archibald Moore had to stake his professional existence on the success of the 15in gun in the Queen Elizabeth-class, and that design could draw heavily on that of the 13.5in gun. You are expecting the Germans to scale as well as they did historically, from a gun an inch smaller and with seven fewer years of designing and building naval ordnance under their belts.
what the RN had historically been doing with upping gun sizes for decades
Can you say which ships you feel represent this trend? The first Royal Navy battleship to carry a 12in BL gun was HMS Colossus in 1882. Between her and Dreadnought, only 3 of the 118 battleships built by the Royal Navy have anything larger than a 13.5in gun, and all three were laid down in the early 1880s. There doesn’t seem to be anything that would justify a German leap to 15in guns.
all the historical ships are still being funded
I don’t think you have actually done the calculations on this point. There’s an argument over the extent to which the cost of battleships is proportionate to displacement, but the rule broadly holds true: let’s see how your proposed construction matches to what Germany could actually afford.
Nassau class: 4x 18,750 tons = 75,000 tons
Helgoland class: 4x 22,808 tons= 91,232 tons
Alt-Nassau: 3x 36,000 tons = 108,000 tons
Alt-Helgoland: 3x 50,000 tons = 150,000 tons
You have a shortfall of 91,768 tons to fund, or the equivalent of another four Helgoland class ships. Holding over construction in the way you suggest means you would only have funds to lay down your Alt-Nassaus at the end of 1908 and the Alt-Helgolands at the end of 1910, not “early 1908” as you suggest. Of course, that’s excluding the additional costs of developing a 15in gun, and those of building docks large enough to hold these ships.
As you have decided not to dredge the Kiel canal to save money, these ships can only reach the Baltic by sailing North around Denmark and passing through the narrow Kattegat. This makes them more vulnerable to torpedo, mine or aerial attack, allows the Russian navy a free hand to shell East Prussia until the fleet arrives (and the French fleet a free hand in the North Sea after it does), and renders the German Navy dependent on the goodwill of Denmark not to close the straits.
Any idea where I can read up on the sizes of ships the various shipyards could accommodate, in this time frame?
Hallman,
Die Anfänge des deutschen Dreadnought-Baues 1905-08 (1938)
Don’t get me started on Battlecruisers!
You can’t avoid building a battlecruiser if the opponent has them. Let me describe the scout units of two forces:
Force A: 4 ships, each capable of reaching 24kts, with 10 4.1in guns in hand-worked mounts and a 3in armoured deck.
Force B: 3 ships, each making 25kts, with 8 12in guns in hydraulic mounts, a 1.5in armoured deck and a belt of between 4 and 9 inches.
What do you think the likely outcome of these two meeting might be? When used for their intended purposes, battlecruisers are successful. The mistake is trying to use battlecruisers to fight battleships, a role for which they were not designed. Even so, had the British not chosen to increase the rate of fire by storing open cordite charges in the turret at Jutland, they would have much fewer issues with survivability.
I suspect it is aimed more at the ships beyond historical size, and not the ones I am actually wanting Germany to build
The classes I listed were designed (not built, just designed) in 1937, 1938, 1938, and 1935, or between 30 and 27 years from your point of departure. The ME-109 first flew in 1935 and the F4 Phantom in 1958, which makes 23 years difference. The RAF constructing the F4 Phantom, therefore, makes marginally more sense than building your Helgoland-class battleship.
they want to have the capability of having the needed capacity and infrastructure to do so.
The Reichstag is not going to support funding huge docks on the off-chance that they might be used, all the more because they have recently been asked to fund such expansion. The enlargement of Wilhelmshaven began in 1901 and involved enlarging a slipway, building three new dry docks and constructing a new lock. Unfortunately, the new lock can only accept ships 250m in length, so will have to be completely rebuilt.
this still slows the funding to remain unchanged
I don’t think you know how the German Naval Laws work. Every year, a certain number of ships would come up for renewal and the Reichstag would vote money to build new ships to replace them. There wasn’t an annual stipend which the RMA could hold over to build ships later. To achieve what you’re suggesting, the entire Naval Law would have to be rewritten rather than just amended.
unlike HMS Dreadnought, it was their all-on-the-centerline main armament layout that was the lasting legacy of these early all-big-gun ships.
Just to illustrate that battleship design must flow from intended tactics, and that one style of armament is not automatically better than another, let’s posit a battle between two equally sized fleets of South Carolinas and Dreadnoughts. The two fleets turn into line of battle and begin firing. Both lines have exactly the same number of guns firing at one another, as each ship has 8 12in guns. If the Royal Navy are getting the best of the engagement, the South Carolinas will turn away to disengage. However, each American ship now only has four guns with rear arcs, compared to the Dreadnought’s six guns with forward arcs. Furthermore, the Dreadnought’s three knot speed advantage means that even if the US Navy turn away, they cannot escape.
I thank you for the link. I have no education along the lines of naval design, and am a complete armature hobbyist along these lines.
To properly simulate the work of a naval designer, try and build the best battleship you can on a strict 50,000 tons limit. Then throw the design away and try and construct one on Washington Treaty rules. Then imagine it serving twenty years later, in circumstances you could have never envisaged when designing it, fighting newer and larger ships. Then imagine people seventy years later criticising your design on the basis of hindsight.
What you’re basically implying with your premise is that the Germans learned absolutely nothing about building battleships from their first four classes of dreadnoughts. In fact, you suggest that they were perfectly capable of building a Queen Elizabeth at any stage but were simply too foolish to do so. The overwhelming question, however, is why the Germans would deliberately build the ships they did if they had the ability to build one of the quality you suggest. The German naval designers had years of experience in the construction of warships, guns, armour and engines. They dealt on a day-to-day basis with the limitations placed on them, and built the best ships that were possible.
Your premise is teleology of the worst sort. Rather than looking at what Germany could afford, or even physically build, you are asking “what battleship gives me the outcome I want” and then attempting to invent a way for the Germans to have that battleship even though, as has been conclusively demonstrated, it is neither physically possible nor logically comprehensible for them to do so.