RN writes the washington naval treaty

A 7" belt won't do much against 16 inch guns, and the G3 has a 14 inch belt, which could shrug off Lexi's 16" guns herself.
G3 is better all round,presuming the British put more effort into fixing the Mk1 guns

That's the point I think. The G3s were advertised as having thin 7" belts, so they'd be regarded as thoroughly vulnerable to the US ships.
Yes I think the RN publicly ordered 7" plates (for deck and hid the belt order) but nobody realised as its way to thick after all the SD 'only' have 3.5" so everybody talked about it as the belt and the RN was happy to keep them thinking that, sadly for RN including the politicians negotiating the WNT.
 
but would declaring the displacement of the G3s reveal the armour-thickness shenanigans of the RN?
No its just too short and radical design to work it out.

The rules that allow you to work out thickness require you to guess how much is protected and with an internal belt that's very hard as you don't know the area covered.
The G3 (and N&R in OTL) didn't have a sufficiently long belt to cover the USN rules, ie they would sink if the rest of the ship flooded, IJN/USN also didn't fully understand why all the turrets are forward and thought at first it was for a CV/BB hybrid in OTL.
Without close inspection (OTL not till WWII) USN/IJN will not realise what exactly they are until far later such as the 1930s or WWII.
 
Last edited:
really think that the IJN and USN design staffs were such idiots not to look into those designs more if they were authorized?
 
really think that the IJN and USN design staffs were such idiots not to look into those designs more if they were authorized?

And the British were willing to give Hoods plans to the Americans...
G3 and Nelson have almost nothing to do with Hood that's the point, they are clean sheets with a very different philosophy's from post WWI thinking that are in effect a very different design generation.

Things like internal v external belts, triple mounts all forward, different belts/deck for Mags/BR/ERs, a sort of AON but not to US standards etc.... all of these add individual errors to any US/J calculation until the error margin is simply to big to work from.

Without close inspection or the plans and the RN will not allow that, its very hard to work out the design just look at the problems the USN had working out the thoughts behind the Nelson design in OTL.
 

Redbeard

Banned
A 7" belt won't do much against 16 inch guns, and the G3 has a 14 inch belt, which could shrug off Lexi's 16" guns herself.
G3 is better all round,presuming the British put more effort into fixing the Mk1 guns
As I understand it, and this not at least from the research of Richard Hawes, the OTL main problems of the 16" mountings on the NelRods came from weight savings introduced in-between G3 and NelRod. This is of course no guarantee that a G3 would be problem free (hardly anything is), but at least not the OTL ones.

Anyway the G3 IMHO was as superior to anything afloat or planned as the Dreadnought was in her time.
 
Top