Just to check - that 1909 build programme is replacing the OTL Splendid Cats with 4 Orions?
It's a cross between the two classes really: these
Orion types have the 8 x 13.5" armament of the
Lion class rather than 10 as OTL. This in combination with much better boilers is enough to get it up to speeds which are regarded as battlecruiser ones for anybody except Fisher at the time while keeping their armour. I'm handwaving things a bit to get this past Fisher, essentially by letting him have 8 not-quite battlecruisers to play with.
Its not going to be Orion of this OTL. Its ATL Orion.
Very much so. Essentially it's a 13.5" version of the
Queen Elizabeth class made possible by the improved boilers.
You will have a problem with the pulverized coal onboard. You need to keep it in a whole form until just before you use it in the boilers. If you don't you run the risk of a coal dust explosion onboard the ship, even with waiting till the end stage if you don't have a way for good dust suppression you would still run the risk. In combat you have to make sure you would be able to have some kind of water spray in case of an emergency.
I'm assuming that there is a dedicated ball mill in each engine room, and that any coal powder created is immediately burned. The whole place will end up covered in coal dust, but no worse than any other ship of the time. Trains experimenting with pulverised fuel seem to have been loaded with the stuff, but that's most likely down to a limitation with the loading gauge rather than anything else. Remember that the RN needs any pulverised fuel ships to share a fuel supply with the rest of the fleet, which means lump coal.
Fuel supply is still going to be an issue (in OTL any extended action would slow down as the ready-use coal was used up and it had to be manhandled from deep bunkers). The real benefit here is that pulverised fuel has a much larger surface area to volume ratio than lump coal, and doesn't need a grate to burn in. This means that you avoid the grate limit (i.e. the air flow rate at which lumps of coal are blown out of the chimney!) and just like oil burners can increase the amount of heat generated in a particular size of boiler, with consequent increases in the power rating of that boiler. The RN were doing something similar in OTL by spraying oil onto the coal, this does the same but more effectively.
This will have major effects on the development of the Imperial German Navy, which was far more dependent on coal than the Royal Navy.
Yes. If anybody has the head-space to write such a timeline I'd be fascinated to read it. I've essentially stopped here because it's going to get very complex very fast.
The patents are held by B&W in the US, and there's nothing to stop Germany from licensing them.
Uh... not exactly. The initial patents were filed in 1899 and 1900 in OTL, but nobody picked up on them outside the cement industry (which is what they were invented for) until the 1920s or so. Here, someone at B&W makes the link earlier and with the naval races going on in Europe thinks there might be some mileage in it.
Now the US aren't interested really - they've got lots of oil which gives the same benefits, and without an immediate threat they're taking an evolutionary path. That isn't true in the UK where Jackie Fisher is very much a revolutionary by nature and oil supply is a concern. B&W also have a UK subsidiary (set up in Glasgow in 1881, with all their international business run from London since 1891) so my assumption is that the engineering work needed to turn the patent into an actual boiler would be done in the UK rather than the US. That means that while the Patent information is available, much of the rest they need to know is not and this would slow down German adoption.
What I had in mind here is that there are a LOT of experiments with different boiler types going on at the time (this is when the world was converting from fire-tube to water-tube) and everything up to the
Topaze class would be lost in the noise of such experiments. A really alert German naval intelligence service might pick something up with the
Topaze class, but it would probably be pretty murky to them as to whether it's a major benefit or not.
St Vincent is where the Germans will absolutely realise what is going on, but at that point they essentially have to start developing the technology from the patent and scale it up to battleship level. That's going to be very tough - and it really isn't retrofittable - so the
König class are probably a bit early and if the
Baden class get it then it's too late to make any real difference.