WW1 Battle Cruisers.

[ikalugin]

Is anyone interested in WW1 Battle Cruisers? If so, would anyone kindly provide suggestions about what they view as an optimal Battle Cruiser/Battle Ship of the era?

[Oberon]

Hard to say really since the idea of the Battlecruiser was an exercise in compromise, I think the Kaiserliche Marine had better Battlecruisers than the Royal Navy, the Lion class was probably our best Battlecruiser and even then she had problems because of our bad handling of explosive propellant.
But the Moltke and Seyditz classes of the KLM were probably superior ships, in my opinion at least.

Steve will probably have better data, he's got a lot of good material on the subject.

[CCIP]

The question is not which ones were best, but what for and how they were used. In a sense, ALL battlecruisers were relatively ineffective. They got almost no use in their intended role of hunting down lesser ships, and fleeing from bigger ones. The role they were actually mainly used in suited the German battlecruiser design better. They were certainly a better ship-of-the-line, and did prove themselves. The British had an additional problem where their operating practices wasted away some of their potential advantages. Brittle shells, poor propellant storage, and poor long-range gunnery were all problems, but not by design.

Personally, I love the battlecruisers, I think they were the best-looking and most adventurous warships of their time, but even I'll be first to admit that, in retrospect, the whole concept of the battlecruiser was a folly and failure. It was one of the least intelligent investments ever made by any navy.

[ikalugin]

Well the reason why I ask, is because I and my friend John Silver are drawing up an alternative Imperial Russian WW1 Navy (ie how it would have been at the beginning of WW1) the current idea is to have 2 drednought BB series (4 ships each), 1 heavy cruiser series and a BC series for the Black Sea.

Currently we sort of got the idea of that Heavy Cruiser concept (based on historic Rurik 2), but we didn't quite finish the Capital Ship concepts.

Hence why I am asking for the opinion of SubSim community on this matter. P.s. If anyone is interested I could show the stuff we have so far.

[Oberon]

The Rurik was a good ship, would be a good basis for a class of Battlecruisers.
The Russian shipbuilding industry was a bit broken in WWI though, I mean look at the mess that was the Borodino. So you might be better ordering from America, the UK or even France. I doubt the UK would be the first choice, given the relations between the UK and Japan pre-WWI, so France or America might be better, maybe one of the Protected Cruisers the French built, or something like the Lexington-class from the US Navy.

[ikalugin]

Which one of the Borodinos? I assume that you refer to the Izmail class BCs, well those were strange, though those 1 inch guns were good. Our main issue is not with guns (Russian 12 inch guns were okay for the pre WW1 ships) or armour (we had okay capability to produce it), or even basic design (after all we make it ourselves), but with... power plants.

Our Rurik 2 derivative is a heavy cruiser with mixed armor (high end around machinery and magazines, light elsewhere), with 8 10 inch guns in two gun turrets, with standard 120mm secondaries.