WWI-Jutland and fallout of possible HSF victory.

[Simon_Jester]

DH, are you an expert in ship design? If you are not, please stop to think.

You say "Let's assume all other variables are unchanged, all else is equal, it's just three engines versus four."

To someone who actually knows how ships work and how to design them, that might sound a lot like "let's assume the square is a circle" or "let's assume five equals six" or something equally boneheaded.

And they would be RIGHT, and you would look like a clown.

[Dominarch's Hope]

No shit. I never said otherwise. In fact, I never even applied that would be the case. In fact, I stated that it wouldnt be possible, but for a statements sake, I went with it.


My gist was, "Assuming everything else was equal, NOT THAT IT WOULD BE, this is true".


So. Do I need to quote all my comments around that and bold the relevant parts?

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Then why are you cluttering up the thread with comparisons that have less relevance than the statistics on the side of a matchbox car box?

[aieeegrunt]

One thing I've always wondered is if the Germans should have just exclusively built battlecruisers.

Undoubtedly yes.

Their battlecruisers were so tough they could actually stand in the line (and most of them even survived being pounded by 15in shellfire they had manifestly never been designed against),

The Germans really had stumbled into the "fast battleship" concept without realizing or intending it. it was the natural outcome of Tirpitz making survivability a design priority for German ships, and his fudging and "cheating" with the German Naval Laws in order to get as many ships capable of forming a battle line as possible.

German ships were without a doubt tougher than British ones, even when you factor out the ammo handling excuses. Seydlitz took a torpedo and a boat load of heavy shells at Jutland and barely managed to limp home. An equivelant British BC took a torpedo at the Dardanelles and had to be immediately beached to stop from sinking. It almost sank again while being towed home. Lion took less shell hits at Dogger than Seydlitz took at Jutland and was very quickly mission killed, Warspite was also eventually knocked out of the battle of Jutland by similar amounts of damage. The Audacious sinks from a single mine, meanwhile the Baden hits a mine and completes it's mission, the Goeben eats several and remains mission capable despite the lack of drydocks.

and unlike the battleships could be deployed as raiders optionally, like the later Kriegsmarine's capital ships were in WW2.

I'm not certain of that. One of the design tradeoffs for that toughness was habitability and range. The ideal surface raider for WWI is a small cheap fast light cruiser with enough 4~6 inch guns to deal with destroyers and deterr enemy light cruisers that can prolong it's cruise by coaling from prizes. Say a faster Emden.

Poor Graf Spee; his armored cruisers were a complete albatross around his neck. Too slow to escape enemy battlecruisers, not big enough to fight them, can't keep steaming on coal scavanged from merchants. About the only thing the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau could hope to accomplish was perhaps sinking some similarily useless enemy armored cruisers or dying gloriously. And looking tough in peacetime I guess. "Like a cut flower in a vase; beautiful to look at, but doomed to die." I think that was Churchill's verdict and i agree with him.

The Germans probably could have accomplished more in the Pacific had you subbed the S & G for like 4 or 5 more light cruisers to run around as a distraction. A heavy cruiser run down by a Brit battlecruiser is just as dead as a light cruiser.

They would have also conferred upon the Germans a substantial speed advantage in refusing engagement, and made the British battlecruisers totally worthless. Worse still is if the British respond by laying down more battlecruisers, so that more comparatively hideously vulnerable ships will be sent out against possibly numerically superiour German forces (in terms of fast ships). The HSF would have then only built enough slow, short-ranged battleships to overmatch the Russians in the Baltic, since the battlecruiser force could be relied upon to defeat the French by sheer weight of numbers.

That would have been a nightmare scenario for the RN to be sure.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Oh god. A battlecruiser race with both sides being majority Battlecruisers? Now THAT would be exactly what the HSF would love. Something like that is a recipe for a lolstomp on the HSFs side. Even better if the British can end up with an even more unbalanced Speed is Armor mentality.

[Sea Skimmer]

Meanwhile in reality land, because battlecruisers cost considerable more then comparable battleships, and British ships were on average cheaper in the first place then German ones, its actually recipe for the Germans to be significantly even more outnumbered and outgunned then before. What's more, the smaller fleets become, the more even a small numerical advantage counts, N2 squared at work. A larger proportion of the outnumbered fleet actually faces two physically opponents and the odds of bringing all the ships into action at once go up. That matters a lot when your guns can't shoot to the horizon.

This is why nobody on the planet built all battlecruisers in the first place, even though it was exactly what Lord Fisher wanted for one (he knew the RN could afford superiority if it really wanted), and obviously a major tactical advantage to dictate the terms of an engagement. That'd also be why one thing the British did pay for in battlecruisers was superior speed. Ones inferior made no real sense. The best thing for the Germans to do was build all dreadnoughts, as the British would have still built at least some battlecruisers for trade protection. That would have made the numerical advantage the smallest possible in a fleet action. This was also exactly what Tirpitz wanted, but the naval laws and Kaisers desires for an empire tied his hands.

The British of course, were also simply in a much better position to spend more money in total, while Germany was already seeing important requirements unfunded in its land army. Though we can blame at least some of that on the incompetence of the German army and its fiasco with the FK 96 field gun, which predates the dreadnought but still greatly affected German spending. Some days I wonder if that event was not being aggressively taught to German overengineers in the interwar period.

[Dominarch's Hope]

Yeah, but if they dont last long enough to deliver all that firepower, as in if Beatty ends up convincing the rest of the force to do what he did with his BCs, then what would really happen is the British battlecruisers get slaughtered for comparably small German losses. Repeatedly.

Which is why Britain didnt do such a thing.

[Sea Skimmer]

No its why your a retard not worth my time to explain stuff I've done a half dozen times before around here. I'll give you a real short version to be nice. See Dogger Bank. How many British ships had ammunition fires, how many German?

[LadyTevar]

Moved to More Appropriate Forum.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Yeah, but if they dont last long enough to deliver all that firepower, as in if Beatty ends up convincing the rest of the force to do what he did with his BCs, then what would really happen is the British battlecruisers get slaughtered for comparably small German losses. Repeatedly.

Which is why Britain didnt do such a thing.

Give it up. There is no history at all in this thread, DH, and therefore, nothing worth talking about.

[Thanas]

Yeah, but if they dont last long enough to deliver all that firepower, as in if Beatty ends up convincing the rest of the force to do what he did with his BCs, then what would really happen is the British battlecruisers get slaughtered for comparably small German losses. Repeatedly.

Which is why Britain didnt do such a thing.

Give it up. There is no history at all in this thread, DH, and therefore, nothing worth talking about.

I agree with DoZ, thread locked.