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.

[CCIP]

Rurik was an armored cruiser - perhaps even the best AC ever built, but it was effectively an end-of-the-line design. That is one thing that BCs did successfully achieve, put an X on all further armored cruiser development. I would suggest not pursuing that, because any AC derivative would be substantially inferior to a true battlecruiser. The "CBs" aka Fisher's monstrosities of late WWI (Furious, Corageous and Glorious) were an aberration and not a very sound concept either; the heavy cruiser as such was basically a post-war invention and effectively just a very enlarged CL, including the protection scheme. But I don't think anything, even better theoretical powerplants, would save the AC in WWI - it was basically an evolutionary dead end. There is no longer any hope for a ship that size and complexity that did not mount an all-big-gun battery, and armor on it would be just dead weight, offering nothing meaningful unless you made the ship BC-sized, in which case, well... isn't that just a battlecruiser you end up with? I'd just go with a conventional BC in its stead, maybe following more from the German model (which, to be fair, were basically proto-fast-battleships without the modern powerplant that would allow them to mount larger weaponry to compete with true fast BBs).

[ikalugin]

The ACs are used for secondary duties within Baltics - considering how few German BCs there were and the local conditions, they would be capable of conducting their duties just fine.

That said, if you look at what I have described.... The Heavy Cruisers I have described were basically.... Battle cruisers - only with lighter than usual armament (4*2*10 inch guns).

[CCIP]

That's true, but I'm just curious exactly what their role would be - personally, I'd cut them out entirely and get more CLs instead, which would be a much better deal for the cost. All the more so because of Germany's chronic shortage of CLs later in the war.

[ikalugin]

Originally Posted by CCIP

That's true, but I'm just curious exactly what their role would be - personally, I'd cut them out entirely and get more CLs instead, which would be a much better deal for the cost. All the more so because of Germany's chronic shortage of CLs later in the war.

Operating in the Baltic (engaging shipping and working with the Novicks).

[ikalugin]

Any suggestions on the battleships? The idea is not to build Sevastopols, but rather have slower and better protected vessels with long barrel 12 inchers.