The Panzerschiffs

Ask an engineer to design something that's good, quick, and cheap. He'll tell you "Pick two". I bring that up because you want your ship to have three properties: 1) Small. 2) Agile. 3) Enough firepower to fend off a battleship. Pick two. If you make it small, will either have room for power plants, or guns, but not both. If you make it fast, it can either be small, or carry big guns. If you carry a large broadside, you can either get small (well, medium-sized), or fast.

Aside from the engineering impossibility of getting all three properties in one hull, just the requirement that a fast ship have the gun power to fend off a battleship is a very tricky proposition. Several people have suggested a ship with 4x15" guns. For a variety of technical reasons, most navies had concluded that six guns were pretty much the minimum for effective long-range gunnery. Even assuming that you can pull decent gunnery with four guns, you still have a major problem. To "fend off" a battleship, you need some area where your guns are superior to the battleship's guns. If you have a range advantage, you can stand back and (hopefully) degrade your target before it can close range on you. If your guns are harder-hitting, you might (emphasis on might) be able to cripple a battleship before it can return the favor. Unfortunately, even with 4x15", you don't have any margin of superiority in either range or hitting power. Any battleship commander coming upon such a ship isn't going to be "concerned" by those four guns...after all, he knows his ship can take a pounding, while yours can't, and he also knows that he has twice your gun power (or more). All you're doing by up-gunning a Panzerschiff is throwing good money after bad, and wasting good guns on a bad idea. The Panzerschiffe were born out of political, rather than operational constraints, and that almost never ends well (the aircraft carriers converted to save Washington Treaty battleship / battlecruiser hulls were the exception that proves the rule).

Although this appears to be logical reasoning, I don't believe it matches up all that well with reality.

Heavy armament or armour or both don't seem to cost as much to size as high speed does. The problem is that high speed requires a long fine hull and a LOT of installed power. Check out the sizes of the Great War battleships and their equivalent battle cruisers. The Battle Cruisers for a few knots extra speed, a LOT less armour and less main armament were much larger ships.

There was a question at one point about why Cruiser machinery was able to achieve nearly as much power with a lot less weight than Capital Ship machinery. I am not quite sure what the real answer was.

The most important point I am trying to make here is that as soon as high speed becomes a requirement, the size of the ship increases drastically as does the cost At that point, you have plenty of room to add heavy armament. If on the other hand, you choose to add armour, the cascading effect starts where you will need more power to push that greater displacement through the water.....

As an example, compare the Washington and South Dakota class BBs to the Iowa class. The armament and armour isn't that different but the extra speed cost around 10,000 tons extra displacement.

- Ivan.
 

Delta Force

Banned
The Springsharp program lets you toy around with questions just like this. It is fairly accurate, and I think that someone once managed to fit two 16 or 18 inch guns (in single turrets) on a ship of only 7,000 tons using the program. Seeing as similar things were done with monitors in real life that is quite reasonable.http://www.springsharp.com/
 

Nietzsche

Banned
The Springsharp program lets you toy around with questions just like this. It is fairly accurate, and I think that someone once managed to fit two 16 or 18 inch guns (in single turrets) on a ship of only 7,000 tons using the program. Seeing as similar things were done with monitors in real life that is quite reasonable.
This looks interesting. Many thanks. I'll see how much I can squeeze into a Panzerschiff hull.
 

Nietzsche

Banned
The Springsharp program lets you toy around with questions just like this. It is fairly accurate, and I think that someone once managed to fit two 16 or 18 inch guns (in single turrets) on a ship of only 7,000 tons using the program. Seeing as similar things were done with monitors in real life that is quite reasonable.

This looks interesting. Many thanks. I'll see how much I can squeeze into a Panzerschiff hull.

Aaaaaand there's no way I can do that thing. Far, far too complicated, no matter how cool it would be.
 
Aaaaaand there's no way I can do that thing. Far, far too complicated, no matter how cool it would be.

The program also has some issues trying to simulate destroyers and some of the more radical designs- there were some options to make that easier by allowing one to play around with things like the SHP/weight ratio of the engines but they haven't been implemented in the most recent version (and considering that it's been 4 years since then, it's probably abandoned)- IIRC, the baseline ship for the program was a US 'standard-type' dreadnought
 

Kissinger

Banned
HMS Incomparable was a plan by Fisher to put 20 inch guns on a battle cruiser with armor so thin a cruiser could kill it:rolleyes: this coming from the guy who saw U-Boats as a viable threat is scary.
 

Delta Force

Banned
Aaaaaand there's no way I can do that thing. Far, far too complicated, no matter how cool it would be.

It is pretty overwhelming the first few times you use it. The best way to learn how to use it is to try to copy a real life ship in the program. The best ones to start with are those that go slower than around 30 knots, are fairly good sized, and are armed with guns as their primary armament (basically armored cruisers and battleships). You can let the program automatically figure out the freeboard if you are not going too fast with it, that is really the hardest part of Springsharp 2. Once you get the hang of things you can start designing ships from scratch and with less conventional design. If you want to start out with unusual designs though Springsharp 3 is pretty good and quite accurate.

As for Springsharp 3 being dead, there are rumors that the programmer who worked on it originally is starting to work on it again. The next update will apparently allow you to adjust the engine sliders (for lighter and less reliable engines and heavier and more reliable engines).
 
Let's see what Germans were considering OTL:

Projekt I/10 (~1923)
length 176 m
beam 18,80 m
draught 6,50 m
steam turbines
32 knots
8x210 mm (4x2), 4x88 mm, 8 torpedo tubes 500 mm
no data about armor

Projekt II/10 (1923)
length 124 m
beam 21,40 m
draught 6,80 m
steam turbines
22 knots
4x380 mm (2x2), 4x150 mm, 2x88 mm, 2 underwater torpedo tubes 500 mm
belt & barbette armor 200 mm, deck 30 mm

Projekt II/30 (1924 or later)
length 132 m
beam 22 m
draught 6,50 m
diesel engines
21 knots
6x305 mm (3x2, 2 stern turrets assymetrical), 3x105 mm, 2 underwater torpedo tubes 530 mm
belt & barbette armor up to 200 mm, deck 25 mm

Projekt I/35 (1924 or later)
length 126 m
beam 21 m
draught 7,20 m
diesel engines
19 knots
3x350 mm (1x3), 4x150 mm, 4x88 mm, 4 underwater torpedo tubes 530 mm
belt 300 mm, barbettes 350 mm, deck 35 mm

Projekt VIII/30 (1924 or later)
length 141 m
beam 20,20 m
draught 7,0 m
diesel engines
24 knots
4x305 mm (2x2), 6x150 mm, 6x88 mm, 2 underwater torpedo tubes 530 mm
no data about armor

Projekt I/M 26 (1926?)
length 188 m
beam 20,70 m
draught 5,50 m
diesel engines
28 knots
6x280 mm(2x3), 8x120 mm, 2 torpedo tubes (probably 530 mm)
belt & barbette armor 100 mm, no data about deck armor
 

Nietzsche

Banned
HMS Incomparable was a plan by Fisher to put 20 inch guns on a battle cruiser with armor so thin a cruiser could kill it:rolleyes: this coming from the guy who saw U-Boats as a viable threat is scary.
...

Wow. My concept, while obviously crazy, is still better than that. Yes, I want to put 16 inchers on an incredibly small ship. But atleast I intend for it to be a raider, never going into direct combat with anything that may sink her. Well not intentionally.
 
Put the gun into a fixed mounting. That should reduce the weight by a serious amount. Give it only a few degrees of elevation and traversal and use charge weights to adjust range.

Remember the dynamite ships?

- Ivan.
 

Nietzsche

Banned
Put the gun into a fixed mounting. That should reduce the weight by a serious amount. Give it only a few degrees of elevation and traversal and use charge weights to adjust range.

Remember the dynamite ships?

- Ivan.
While your ingenuity is incredibly impressive, that would cause more problems than it would end up solving. Incredible points for originality though. Wait. I just assumed you meant make the guns actual dynamite guns. The only issue now is, well, it'd be faster to build standardized large guns in a turret than individual ones mounted wherever.

Hmm. I'm tempted to simply toss all the belt armour(something not needed in then-modern shipfighting anyway) and load up the most power-to-weight ratio engines possible.
 
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IMHO no 10.000ts ship can hope to defeat a BB/BC of the 20s/30s/40s.

you can't put enough armor in such a ship. even if you put a big BB gun (say 15"+) in a small hull you will need a lucky hit on a BB to win against a standard dreadnought type ship. And counting on lucky hist is something only a madman would do ;).

10.000 ts don't allow the armor needed to absorbe large caliber hits.

Monitors and coastal defence ships (the same ;)) are just gun platforms not ships that can perform "cruiser warfare".

THE Panzerschiffe are probably the best you can get at this size.

Even the Alaska/CB-1 (the better ship) had only 12"-guns but needed a 30.000+ ts hull to build.
 

Adler

Banned
The Panzerschiffe were designed as raiders and not as monitors (which were also planned). That means you need a ship better armed than cruisers and faster than battleships. For that task the Deutschland class was perfectly useable. That means, it was needed to fight off enemy cruisers. Rio de la Plata showed the abilities of this kind of ship. Unfortunately Langsdorff was a destroyer commander and led his ship more like a destroyer and not a capital ship. If he had used his guns in the superior ranges, he would have likely fought off the attack of the three cruisers.

Adler
 

Nietzsche

Banned
IMHO no 10.000ts ship can hope to defeat a BB/BC of the 20s/30s/40s.

you can't put enough armor in such a ship. even if you put a big BB gun (say 15"+) in a small hull you will need a lucky hit on a BB to win against a standard dreadnought type ship. And counting on lucky hist is something only a madman would do ;).

10.000 ts don't allow the armor needed to absorbe large caliber hits.

Monitors and coastal defence ships (the same ;)) are just gun platforms not ships that can perform "cruiser warfare".

THE Panzerschiffe are probably the best you can get at this size.

Even the Alaska/CB-1 (the better ship) had only 12"-guns but needed a 30.000+ ts hull to build.

The Panzerschiffe were designed as raiders and not as monitors (which were also planned). That means you need a ship better armed than cruisers and faster than battleships. For that task the Deutschland class was perfectly useable. That means, it was needed to fight off enemy cruisers. Rio de la Plata showed the abilities of this kind of ship. Unfortunately Langsdorff was a destroyer commander and led his ship more like a destroyer and not a capital ship. If he had used his guns in the superior ranges, he would have likely fought off the attack of the three cruisers.

Adler

Gentlemen, if you notice I said it was going to be a raider, however with larger guns to make most older BBs/BCs (mainly the latter, as they'll be the ones quick enough to catch said Panzerschiffs) think twice about engaging. It's not about being able to beat one, just put doubt in the mind of conservative admirals, already iffy about engaging in general, that the damage sustained would not be worth sinking the plucky little thing.

More or less the actual purpose of the BBs and BCs the German navy actually built. This investment is easier on German shipyards, accomplishes roughly the same thing, and they can replace these with far less hassle, or build more for the same general cost of the Bismarck, while getting all the other perks afforded to having more ships. Namely, wider coverage.
 
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