The Austere Class Battleships

Kind of like the two TONE class cruisers?

Yes. My personal 'darling' (and others from what i have seen on here) and one that is very easy to murder, is converting the 3 Hawkins class Cruisers into 'Patrol Carriers' with say capacity for a dozen or so Aircraft.

And have these at the centre of Hunting groups able to operate in the South Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

I think this version was by Peg Leg Pom from this thread

hms-vindictive-1918-aircraft-carrier-png.280469


I would rather this x 3 than the Tone!
 
++Snip++
One idea to keep the costs as low as possible was to reuse of the proven Mk1 twin 15” gun turrets as between the cost of new turrets on a new class of ship represented a large % of the cost and necessary development times would not see new weapon systems available for some years further delaying any replacement ships.

++Snip++
Forgive me but I Have only read page 1 to date.

So the design is basically an F2 Class ship?

https://www.world-war.co.uk/bb/nelson_class.php3 (Scroll down to Design, Paragraph 1)

The ship was designed in the 1920's as a battlecruiser version of the NelRod's. The Nelson's were the O3 Class, direct successor of the N3 Class. The F2 / F3's were the direct successor of the G3 Class.

Images off Web. Not mine.

F2F3.jpg

F2F3-1.gif
 

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Forgive me but I Have only read page 1 to date.

So the design is basically an F2 Class ship?

https://www.world-war.co.uk/bb/nelson_class.php3 (Scroll down to Design, Paragraph 1)

The ship was designed in the 1920's as a battlecruiser version of the NelRod's. The Nelson's were the O3 Class, direct successor of the N3 Class. The F2 / F3's were the direct successor of the G3 Class.

Images off Web. Not mine.

View attachment 465544
View attachment 465545

Thanks for the Pictures

Yes effectively these Austere ships are F2s but effectively built to a Mid 30s KGV standard
 
I've heard about the Furious set, but I don't know if its true or if they were still around in 1930. Therefore, I didn't include them in the pool of turrets that were available.

I also knew about the 15" turrets on the 4 monitors. I deliberately didn't mention them either because there was still a need for these ships.

In any case this only gives enough turrets for 2 extra Austerity class ships and we need enough for 3 plus replacements for the turrets removed from the monitors. However, in the latter case it might be possible to replace them with the twin 13.5" turrets removed from the Iron Duke class and Tiger.
Sorry - Only on Page 5.

HMS Furious was designed with single 18" turrets, one fwd one aft. Completed with the aft turret only, so no extra 15" twins available there I'm afraid.
 
Sorry - Only on Page 5.

HMS Furious was designed with single 18" turrets, one fwd one aft. Completed with the aft turret only, so no extra 15" twins available there I'm afraid.
If you read on you will note that 2x15" turrets were built for furious. They ended up in monitors.
 
An O3 Cruiser.......watch this space......

No seriously LOL watch this space - because that's another darling of mine - an O3 Town 'light cruiser' with 3 x Quad 6" all forwards and the Hanger and catapult more towards the rear
And she will be known as an insanely wet ship..... All that weight forward.....
 
15" Turrets for HMS Furious
Source: Conway's 1906-21, Page 49, the entry on the Erebus class
To speed construction Marshal Ney's 15in turret was transferred to Terror, but as the Admiralty had now decided to retain Marshal Soult her turret was no longer available Fortunately two spare turrets had been earmarked for Furious in case her 18in guns proved unsatisfactory, and one of these was brought forward for Erebus.
Does the above solve the mystery?

While I'm at it, from Page 46, the entry on the Marshal Soult class
It had been hoped to use the turrets building for Renown and Repulse (the fourth turret for the original design) but they could not be ready before 1916. In their place turrets were diverted from Ramillies, allowing the ships to be completed by November 1915 at the latest.
 
While I'm at it at least 56 twin 15" Mk I turrets must have been ordered before the outbreak of the Great War. See below.

15in Mk I turrets ordered.png


54 were actually fitted. See below.

15in Mk I turrets fitted.png


Plus at least 16 twin 15" Mk II turrets must have been ordered for the Hood class, but AFAIK only 4 of them were completed.

That would make a grand total of 54 Mk I and 4 Mk II turrets for a grand total of 58 turrets. According to the Naval Weapons website...
A total of 186 guns, including two prototypes, and 58 turrets were manufactured between 1912 and 1918.
 
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And she will be known as an insanely wet ship..... All that weight forward.....

Its okay the moment of madness has passed they will instead be built in a more conventional 3 x quad x 6"

The idea being that the 'man hours' saved by not having to design the Quad and twin 14" from the OTL KGV as well as numerous destroyer guns systems (basically using the Twin 4.5 on fleet DDs and as secondaries on BBs and Primaries on fleet carriers and twin 4" for anything smaller - 2nds on CLs and primary on DDE or smaller) has allowed the designers to go to 'Town' (yes fully aware of what I did there) on the 6" armament on the Town class and subsequent Crown colonies etc


While I'm at it at least 56 twin 15" Mk I turrets must have been ordered before the outbreak of the Great War. See below.

View attachment 465593

54 were actually fitted. See below.

View attachment 465595

Plus at least 16 twin 15" Mk II turrets must have been ordered for the Hood class, but AFAIK only 4 of them were completed.

That would make a grand total of 54 Mk I and 4 Mk II turrets for a grand total of 58 turrets. According to the Naval Weapons website...

I also made it 54 x MK1 Twins and 4 x MK2 Twins (on Mighty Ood)

Not sure about the 2 prototypes?
 
This is from a Cabinet Paper that I downloaded from the National Archives website. The paper is dated December 1937 and is called Defence Expenditure in Future Years. The document's reference number is CAB.024.273 (0041)

However, this extract is from an appendix to the paper called the Calculation of the Size of the Fleet required under the Proposed New Standard of Naval Strength, which is dated April 1937.

Capital Ship Strength December 1937.png

 
Austere Class Battleship (1933), United kingdom Fast Battleship laid down 1933

Displacement:
31,078 t light; 32,637 t standard; 35,074 t normal; 37,025 t full load

Cost:
£13.124 million / $52.498 million
The first raison d'être of the Austere class battleship is that it's cheap to build so that the Admiralty can persuade the British Government to provide the money required.

Except that Nelson and Rodney cost about £7.5 million to build and the estimated cost of an "all new" capital ship in the 1930s was also £7.5 million. This "cheap" capital ship actually costs 75% more than an "expensive" all new ship.

Incidentally, the 1934-37 rebuilt of Warspite cost £2.4 million. The rebuilds of Queen Elisabeth, Renown and Valiant cost about £3 million each. Depending on the source the proposed rebuild of Hood was expected to cost between £4.0 and £4.5 million.

The second raison d'être of the Austere class is that the smaller displacement allows more ships to be built out of the WNT quota of 525,000 tons. Furthermore, the increase in the number of ships built has to be large enough to compensate for the reduction in the quality of the individual ships.

525,000 tons divided by 32,637 equals 16 and a bit.
All 18 Austere class battleships are laid down before the end of 1936. Therefore, unless the TTL version of the First LNT increases the quota the standard displacement will have to be reduced to 29,166 tons each.

You might be better off with a ship mounting six 15" guns on a standard displacement of 35,000 tons. This would be a British analogue of The Twins. They officially displaced 26,000 tons, but actually displaced nearly 35,000 tons (Source Conway's 1922-46).
 
Where is the enormous pile of cash for this coming from? Surely not the Exchequer?
In the scheme of things it's a significant amount of cash, but not an enormous amount of cash. Furthermore, it's the Cabinet, Parliament and the electorate that voted them in that decides, not the Exchequer.

As usual HM Treasury is not the enemy here. It will argue that healthy government finances are the "Fourth arm of Defence," and it will have a point, but in the end it is the elected government that decides how much to spend and what to spend it on, not the Treasury. It's job is to raise the money. Furthermore, I intend to show that a modest increase in defence spending over OTL is feasible without wrecking the government's finances.

This brings us on to who the actual enemies were, that is the British Government and the people that elected it. Many members of parliament were against spending money on armaments and so was a significant number of people who voted.

This is a quote from Page 127 of Grand Strategy Volume 1 - Rearmament Policy. It is about the announcement in July 1934 of RAF Expansion Scheme A, which IIRC only increased the gross Air Estimates from about £20 million a year to £24.5 million a year. I have put the relevant text in bold.
It is not unfair to end this story of the first deficiency programme on a note of bleak frustration. A balanced programme of £75 million had been amended to one only two-thirds that size, and so altered in distribution that the air gained at the expense of the other two arms for reasons far from convincing on military grounds alone however much they appealed to the general public. In his announcement to the House of Commons on 30th July, the Government spokesman, Mr. Baldwin, mentioned only the measures designed to strengthen the Royal Air Force. (110) And even this modest announcement was greeted by the Leader of the Opposition with the words

'We deny the need for increased air armaments'. (111)
Time for another spreadsheet.

British Government Revenue and Expenditure 1918-19 to 1939-40

Revenue and Expenditure 1918-40.png

See the reduction in spending around 1922-23. The Geddes Axe is noted for cutting government expenditure, but as the above shows the revenue was cut too. Therefore, ITTL it is possible to increase taxes back to "pre-Geddes" levels. However, it would have been electoral suicide for the government that implemented it to use the extra revenue to increase expenditure on armaments.

However, @Cryhavoc101's pod coincides with the significant reduction in the cost of servicing the National Debt. This is probably what made OTL's rearmament financially possible later in the decade. ITTL a modest increase in defence expenditure in the period 1932-36 is feasible financially. However, as I have already written the political feasibility is a different matter.
 
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