Shadow Master
Banned
This kind of ship is what I wanted to avoid. It is probably far cheaper than OTL BC's but not enough cheaper to be built, especially in numbers. This thread is going the way I thought it would, in that historically, ship building nations always wanted to build bigger and bigger ships, which is a natural tendency, but the opposite of what I am wanting to accomplish. I too would have wanted an armoured scout, not to break through to the enemies main fleet, but just to survive incoming fire long enough to get the contact report off and acknowledged while I turn tail and lead the enemy into my fleets guns (or away from them, as the case may be), but in either case, I would want to have a squadron of ships for such task, and formed up to have a point ship well ahead of the others, so if the point ship blunders into the enemy main body, it may or may not escape, but the rest of the squadron is out of sight/range (else the first ship wouldn't have blundered into their main forces gun range), and they will report the contact location, so mission accomplished!My problem is that with 2x5.9" and 8x4" (in open mounts) you can't effectively fend off any ships be it CLs or BCs, they will just close and fire at you. At that point the belt will protect you partially it will stop penetration of the vitals but a percentage of hits will be lucky and hit something not covered properly and they will damage and slow you down, your guns will on the other hand achieve next to nothing and be suppressed by fire early on especially v a BCs.
This ship can scout but it will have to turn away as soon as it meets BCs so cant push through to find the main fleet without the risk of a lucky hit crippling it and them just getting sunk by being the target for far to many heavy guns to survive as it get pounded under the water by the grand fleet battleships or you will be sunk by Cl/DD torps quickly once you have no guns to stop them closing in.
I cannot see building ships like those posited above, all through this thread, including my initial 'design criteria', as they cannot work in the tonnage range I am looking for.
So guys, can someone plug in the historical B97 and the S113? I'd like to get the official SS estimate on their cost (Even if to low, we can adjust that upwards as needed) because I need to know what I'll have to pay for my surplus if I build unarmoured, very fast scouts, in numbers, for my ATL IGN. That or someone help me figure out the infernal & arcane workings of the SS program, so I can do it myself, lol.