WW1 arms race: Germany vs. Great Britain

[Sea Skimmer]

From what I understood, the German ships took more hits due to their numerical inferiourity, so I think that it is no wonder a lot of them were in bad shape.

Numbers did have some effect yes, but the Germans were not so badly outnumbered in much of the run to the south. As an aside, German ships also simply cost more, ensuring they’d be fewer in number. Some of that however was beyond the control of the ship designers, such as German heavy guns cost more because they were of built up construction instead of wire wound. That meant they had longer life spans then RN guns, but this was a minor advantage when the ships engaged in battle so rarely. Ironically German ships carried considerably less ammunition per gun then British ones. Typically about 80-90 rounds per gun, while RN ships had up to 120 rounds. However this was not a serious disadvantage in combat, no ship at Jutland fired off over 50% of the total supply onboard.

I think I see your point here: Since a hit from Moltke was unable to penetrate a barbette of Tiger (but not vice versa), the German ships were comparatively under-armed.

AFAIK Tiger was hit by Moltke with 28cm guns. Could the 30.5cm guns of the Derfflinger-class have penetrated the barbette?

At 16,000 yards and an ideal target angle on certain parts of the barbettes they become vulnerable; parts of them are behind additional belt armor. At a realistic target angle they are vulnerable at about 14,000 yards. The closest the two battlecruiser lines came in the run to the south was about 14,400 yards, and the British then executed a turn to start opening the range.

I checked up, the thickest armor known penetrated by a German shell in the battle is the 7.5in upper belt on HMS Warspite. That doesn’t mean it was impossible for the Germans to defeat thicker armor, but it wasn’t easy for them to do so in a battle fought at not less then 14,000 yards and much it at closer to 20,000. While German shells were much better then RN ones, they also did suffer problems with erratic performance.

The German 12in 50cal gun wasn’t too bad of a weapon though in my book; the 28cm was plainly underpowered in both 45 and 50cal forms and only made sense if you expected a battle at 6000 yards or so. The RN belief was that more firepower was always better, and after all, the bloody mission is to sink the enemy.

So you were right, she couldn't have made it back home on her own. On the other hand, if Wikipedia is correct, it was also not impossible to get her home with some help. They just ran out of time.

The wiki is wrong. See a real source such as Jutland an Analysis of the fighting by John Campbell page 294. Her main deck was partly submerged at the time she was abandon, and the British fleet had already passed far to the south several hours earlier. The closest they came in the night was around 2030 hours, while the order to abandon was given at 0055 in the morning. Its typical wanker excuses. You might not feel that way personally but I’ve been dealing with the same shit on this over and over and over again for literally as long as I have been on the internet. I’m not kidding, the first forums I ever used were the warships1 forums, now navweapons forums four versions of forum software later, and this stuff was alive and well back then in the 1990s. So you’re just going to have to deal with me having no patience for it.

This discussion is about WW1 battlecruisers. Bluecher was an armored cruiser, exactly the type the Invincible-class was designed to obsolete.

Which does not change the fact that her magazines exploded. Remember, magazines are below the water line on these ships and she was pummeled with short range gunfire. Direct hit on the magazine is impossible; it had to be from a spreading fire and failure of prompt magazine flooding. Anyway I think this means less to you then it might, because you’re not familiar with the debates and facts of British vs. German propellant stability that are heavily involved with the cause of the Jutland explosions. Suffice to say German was better, but by no means perfect.

But this is exactly the point: This ship barely avoided explosion, that ship barely avoided explosion, but the only ships which actually exploded where the Britisch battlecruisers.

Yes and most likely because they ignored basic safety precautions, though the turret crowns on RN ships were certainly weak. However they were not significantly better on German ships. Both sides lost multiple turrets to hits on the crowns that most likely would have failed to pierce the faceplates.

So in addition to their weak guns, the heavily armored belt was no real advantage for KM battlecruisers?

This would mean that the German battlecruisers would have been more effective with bigger guns, but less armored belt?

Very possibly. In fact if you look at diagrams of some of the late war German designs, stuff that was never completed or just paper, the main belts ceased to get thicker and in some cases were thinner, while upper and fore and aft armor belts increased in thickness considerably, and main gun armament increased to match British standards. The Germans also put light battlecruiser clones patterned on HMS Glorious on paper which had only 170mm thick main armor belts and thought that acceptable when backed by a sloped armor deck. Apparently the Kaisers fleet really liked Glorious when they saw her in action in 1917. I have no idea why.

The Germans thick main belts were chosen specifically to provide complete immunity, which they did against RN guns and ammunition of 1916, but this helped make the ships unbalanced designs, and with limited money and limited tonnage, balance is important. The High Seas Fleet was never a very balanced organization at any level. I think that traces back to the fact that it was built up to loose.

Postwar RN gunner trials conducted against SMS Baden, after they salvaged her, with the 15in guns and post Jutland Greenboy APC shells were able to pierce the 350mm belt and 350mm barbette on the ship. Greenboy shells were only issued in early 1918. Range was only about 14,000 yards though, not exactly long. Of course Baden herself also had 15in guns. The 12in angled belt on Hood was superior protection compared to 350mm thick vertical armor. Sadly no designs for late WW1 British battleships exist to compare Baden or L20a against. The 1920-22 RN studies completely obliterate anything from the era, but it isn’t a fair comparison in thinking.

This in turn would mean that Tiger-like designs were the best battecruiser designs back then.

I think Kongo was likely the best; as she had more uniform armoring thicknesses. Tiger was a Queen Mary quickly redesigned to be more like Kongo which was built in a British yard for Japan and had an obviously superior main gun arrangement.

And the Renown-class would have been a step in the wrong direction?

Yeah, she was. 6in belt armor was okay in 1907, it was not okay in 1915, but Fisher loved his speed and was in one of his extra mad spells at the time. The armor on Hood as initially designed as a little more reasonable with an 8in angled belt that would stop German guns nicely at battle ranges. Renown as rebuilt with the 9in belt was much better.

HMS Hood as redesigned with 12in angled belt was pretty much the best all around armored ship in the world upon competition. This is sadly why her interwar rebuild was constantly delayed and never took place.

But on the other hand: ´Why did then only RN battlecruisers blow up so spectaculary? Why did all other ships with similar hits escape such an explosion?

The most likely cause by far is that orders were issued after Dogger bank to increase rates of fire at all costs in the battlecruiser force. The RN and Admiral Beatty felt the Germans had escaped at Dogger bank because ships fired too slowly to rapidly establish hitting. End result was that large numbers of extra powder charges were packed into the handling rooms and turrets which should not have been present. This meant if a ammunition fire did occur, it would be much larger and more violent then it should have been, and rapidly spread to the magazines. These orders were quietly canceled after the battle. RN cordite was also simply a relatively vulnerable propellent. After Jutland it was replaced by a more stable formulation. Postwar all navies further improved powder stability. So you have a compounding problem at work. Poor flash tightness was a contributing factor, but its by no means clear better systems would have been enough to save the ships, and as I noted not all German battlecruisers or dreadnoughts had actually been refitted with such protection.

Some have asserted that the RN ships blew up because of main gun pentirations of the magazines. This is basically implausible, the spaces were too heavily armored, and the angle of impact of shells at the ranges involved largely precluded it, the angle is too shallow. What is more, and more important since it is a verifiable fact, is that in no case on either side did a shell penetrate a machinery or boiler room space, and those spaces make up much larger fractions of a ships hull then the magazines do.

Now at Dogger Bank itself, HMS Lion was hit 17 times, didn’t blowup, lost no turrets, and had only 21 casualties. Flooding damage did however slow her down and put her out of the fight. That goes back to the important issue of hit placement. One hit in the wrong place can cripple or sink a ship. On the other had numerous hits on both side’s ships on the upper works often did effectively no meaningful damage.

Lutzow for example took much of her bow flooding that ultimately doomed her from a 12in or 13.5in CPC shell that burst on the forward belt, blowing in an enormous hole. On the other hand a number of other hits burst in areas which just didn’t matter. Issues like this make hit counts a problematic way of measuring damage, which is why I’ve been including notes like if ships lost speed or armament or how bad flooding was. The symptoms matter. That a ‘hit’ took place is unimportant without considering the symptoms. Afterall a hit that is totally rejected by the armor and bounces off into the sea, or breaks into pieces without exploding is still a hit. But do we care?

From what I understood, the German ships took more hits due to their numerical inferiourity, so I think that it is no wonder a lot of them were in bad shape.

Numbers did have some effect yes, but the Germans were not so badly outnumbered in much of the run to the south. As an aside, German ships also simply cost more, ensuring they’d be fewer in number. Some of that however was beyond the control of the ship designers, such as German heavy guns cost more because they were of built up construction instead of wire wound. That meant they had longer life spans then RN guns, but this was a minor advantage when the ships engaged in battle so rarely. Ironically German ships carried considerably less ammunition per gun then British ones. Typically about 80-90 rounds per gun, while RN ships had up to 120 rounds. However this was not a serious disadvantage in combat, no ship at Jutland fired off over 50% of the total supply onboard.

I think I see your point here: Since a hit from Moltke was unable to penetrate a barbette of Tiger (but not vice versa), the German ships were comparatively under-armed.

AFAIK Tiger was hit by Moltke with 28cm guns. Could the 30.5cm guns of the Derfflinger-class have penetrated the barbette?

At 16,000 yards and an ideal target angle on certain parts of the barbettes they become vulnerable; parts of them are behind additional belt armor. At a realistic target angle they are vulnerable at about 14,000 yards. The closest the two battlecruiser lines came in the run to the south was about 14,400 yards, and the British then executed a turn to start opening the range.

I checked up, the thickest armor known penetrated by a German shell in the battle is the 7.5in upper belt on HMS Warspite. That doesn’t mean it was impossible for the Germans to defeat thicker armor, but it wasn’t easy for them to do so in a battle fought at not less then 14,000 yards and much it at closer to 20,000. While German shells were much better then RN ones, they also did suffer problems with erratic performance.

The German 12in 50cal gun wasn’t too bad of a weapon though in my book; the 28cm was plainly underpowered in both 45 and 50cal forms. Even for its time it was weak; this had a lot to do with nobody having effective APC shells until just before the war when the Germans introduced good ones. The RN opinion though was that even if the shells would not penetrate thick armor, bigger shells from bigger guns were still much better, because they could fire immensely destructive CPC and HE rounds.

So you were right, she couldn't have made it back home on her own. On the other hand, if Wikipedia is correct, it was also not impossible to get her home with some help. They just ran out of time.

The wiki is wrong. See a real source such as Jutland an Analysis of the fighting by John Campbell page 294. Her main deck was partly submerged at the time she was abandon, and the British fleet had already passed far to the south several hours earlier. The closest they came in the night was around 2030 hours, while the order to abandon was given at 0055 in the morning.

This discussion is about WW1 battlecruisers. Bluecher was an armored cruiser, exactly the type the Invincible-class was designed to obsolete.

Which does not change the fact that her magazines exploded. Remember, magazines are below the water line on these ships and she was pummeled with short range gunfire. Direct hit on the magazine is impossible, it had to be from a spreading fire.

But this is exactly the point: This ship barely avoided explosion, that ship barely avoided explosion, but the only ships which actually exploded where the Britisch battlecruisers.

Yes and most likely because they ignored basic safety precautions, though the turret crowns on RN ships were certainly weak, but they were not much better on German ships. Both sides lost multiple turrets to hits on the crowns that most likely would have failed to pierce the faceplates.

So in addition to their weak guns, the heavily armored belt was no real advantage for KM battlecruisers?

This would mean that the German battlecruisers would have been more effective with bigger guns, but less armored belt?

Very possibly. In fact if you look at some of the late war German designs, stuff that was never completed or just paper, the main belts ceased to get thicker and in some cases were thinner, while upper and fore and aft armor belts increased in thickness considerably (as much as 250mm thick!), and main gun armament increased to match British standards. The Germans also put light battlecruisers like HMS Glorious on paper which had only 170mm thick main armor belts and thought that acceptable when backed by a sloped armor deck. On the other hand the massive L20a battleship design, the final wartime German design with no chance of being built, had 42cm guns and basically was as big as the WW2 Iowa class. Yet the maximum armor thickness was no more then that of SMS Kaiser laid down in 1909.

The Germans thick main belts were chosen specifically to provide complete immunity, which they did against RN guns and ammunition of 1916, but this helped make the ships unbalanced designs, and with limited money and limited tonnage, balance is important. The thing is considerably less thickness still would have provided total immunity in 1916. On the other hand by 1918 we known RN Greenboy shells and the 15in gun could still pierce those thick 350mm belts and barbettes at useful ranges. We know because it was tested with live fire against the salvaged SMS Baden postwar.

This in turn would mean that Tiger-like designs were the best battecruiser designs back then.

I think Kongo was likely the best; as she had more uniform armoring thicknesses. Tiger was a Queen Mary quickly redesigned to be more like Kongo which was built in a British yard for Japan and had a superior main gun arrangement.

And the Renown-class would have been a step in the wrong direction?

Yeah, she was. 6in belt armor was okay in 1907, it was not okay in 1915, but Fisher loved his speed and bouts of madness. The armor on Hood as initially designed as a little more reasonable. Renown with the 9in belt was much better. HMS Hood as redesigned was pretty much the best all around armored ship in the world upon competition. Her adoption of sloped armor was a radical step forward in protection. This is sadly why her interwar rebuild was constantly delayed and never took place, denying her increased deck armor to deal with high angle threats that did not exist in 1916. Then she got blown up.

But on the other hand: ´Why did then only RN battlecruisers blow up so spectaculary? Why did all other ships with similar hits escape such an explosion?

Orders were issued after Dogger bank to increase rates of fire at all costs in the battlecruiser force. The RN and Admiral Beatty felt the Germans had escaped at Dogger bank because ships fired too slowly to rapidly establish hitting. End result was that large numbers of extra powder charges were packed into the handling rooms and turrets which should not have been present. This meant if a fire did occur, it would be much larger and more violent then it should have been, and rapidly spread to the magazines. These orders were quietly canceled after the battle. RN cordite was also simply a relatively vulnerable propellent. After Jutland it was replaced by a more stable formulation. Postwar all navies further improved powder stability.

Some have asserted that the RN ships blew up because of main gun pentirations of the magazines. This is basically implausible, the spaces were too heavily armored, and the angle of impact of shells at the ranges involved largely precluded it, the angle is too shallow. What is more, and more important since it is a verifiable fact, is that in no case on either side did a shell penetrate a machinery or boiler room space, and those spaces make up much larger fractions of a ships hull then the magazines do.

Now at Dogger Bank itself, HMS Lion was hit 17 times, didn’t blowup, lost no turrets, and had only 21 casualties. Flooding damage did however slow her down and put her out of the fight. That goes back to the important issue of hit placement. One hit in the wrong place can cripple or sink a ship. On the other had numerous hits on both side’s ships on the upper works did effectively no meaningful damage.

Lutzow for example took much of her bow flooding that ultimately doomed her from a 12in or 13.5in CPC shell, I forgot which, I think 12in, that burst on the forward belt, blowing in an enormous hole and riddling all the bow compartments with holes so flooding couldn't be localized. On the other hand a number of other hits burst in areas which just didn’t matter, such as non penetrating hits on her barbettes. Issues like this make hit counts a problematic way of measuring damage, which is why I’ve been including notes like if ships lost speed or armament or how bad flooding was.

[BabelHuber]

By the way, BabelHuber, you wouldn't happen to be from a German-speaking country, would you? I caught you spelling "British" as "Britisch" once. And you sometimes at the end of the sentence your verb put.

[This is not a criticism, just wondering; to me your English reads like I'd expect from a German with a reasonably good education in the English language, but without the fine polish of long practice and experience.]

Yes, I'm from Germany. I regularily need to speak English at work, though. But most people I talk to are non-native speakers, too. In comparison usually my English is not that bad

The German 12in 50cal gun wasn’t too bad of a weapon though in my book; the 28cm was plainly underpowered in both 45 and 50cal forms and only made sense if you expected a battle at 6000 yards or so. The RN belief was that more firepower was always better, and after all, the bloody mission is to sink the enemy.

OK, so we can consider pre-Derfflinger battlecruisers to be under-armed. This is a little bid strange, since AFAIK German battlecruiser were designed be able to fight in the line of battle. I would expect them to have guns which actually can do some harm to enemy dreadnoughts, then. But this seemingly wasn't the case.

But I guess that at least against the weaker armored Invincibles/Indefatigables the 28cm guns were effective. Otherwise Von der Tann/ Moltke/ Seydlitz were faulty designs from the very start.

The wiki is wrong

OK.

Which does not change the fact that her magazines exploded. Remember, magazines are below the water line on these ships and she was pummeled with short range gunfire. Direct hit on the magazine is impossible; it had to be from a spreading fire and failure of prompt magazine flooding. Anyway I think this means less to you then it might, because you’re not familiar with the debates and facts of British vs. German propellant stability that are heavily involved with the cause of the Jutland explosions. Suffice to say German was better, but by no means perfect.

No, it does not change that fact. But Blücher was pummeled by RN battlecruisers while the rest of the KM fleet retreated to safety. For me as a layman it is not surprising that an armored cruiser which is torn to pieces by enemy battlecruisers explodes. OTOH ships exploding because of a lucky hit from comparable ships is something different, especially when the battle is 5 vs. 6 ships, not 1 vs. 5 or so.

But OTOH I can of course accept that bad ammunition handling is the cause for the RN battlecruisers blowing up.

The Germans thick main belts were chosen specifically to provide complete immunity, which they did against RN guns and ammunition of 1916, but this helped make the ships unbalanced designs, and with limited money and limited tonnage, balance is important. The High Seas Fleet was never a very balanced organization at any level. I think that traces back to the fact that it was built up to loose.

Understood.

[Simon_Jester]

The German 12in 50cal gun wasn’t too bad of a weapon though in my book; the 28cm was plainly underpowered in both 45 and 50cal forms and only made sense if you expected a battle at 6000 yards or so. The RN belief was that more firepower was always better, and after all, the bloody mission is to sink the enemy.

OK, so we can consider pre-Derfflinger battlecruisers to be under-armed. This is a little bid strange, since AFAIK German battlecruiser were designed be able to fight in the line of battle. I would expect them to have guns which actually can do some harm to enemy dreadnoughts, then. But this seemingly wasn't the case.

The Germans ran into an inherent contradiction in the design.

To grossly oversimplify, a ship has four traits: armor, firepower, speed, and tonnage. To increase any of the first three, without trading off anything else, you have to accept heavier tonnage.

To make a ship survivable in line of battle it must have good armor, to make it able to withstand capital ship fire from the enemy line. To make it able to carry out the battlecruiser mission, it must have good speed, superior to a normal battleship of the era. Once you've made both those decisions, you are forced to either make your ship bigger, or make your ship lightly armed. The Germans chose the second option, accepting smaller-caliber guns and shells. Better fire control and ammunition kept that from hurting them too much at Jutland, but it would have hurt them quite a bit more later on, when the British caught up in armor-piercing shell design.

[Sea Skimmer]

OK, so we can consider pre-Derfflinger battlecruisers to be under-armed. This is a little bid strange, since AFAIK German battlecruiser were designed be able to fight in the line of battle. I would expect them to have guns which actually can do some harm to enemy dreadnoughts, then. But this seemingly wasn't the case.

German battlecruisers started being built for one big reason. The naval law allowed the fleet to have eight big cruisers, and such ships had been approved in advance. Tirpitz gamed the system to get ships already authorized as armored cruisers laid down as battlecruisers, then kept doing it. If he had his own way the navy simply would have gotten more battleships.

The main mission of big German cruisers had been to show the flag in peacetime, this is why Blucher was still laid down even though she was plainly obsolete for any purpose, the Germans fully knew of the I class at the time. Blucher was actually chosen over other designs with 8 x 240mm guns too. The show the flag mission was alive and well in 1914, which is why Goeben was in the Med and Scharnhorst and Gneisenau the Far East even though obviously these ships would be in deep shit if a war broke out.

A tactical role for these ships, was well, invented I think, they were built because of procurement politics first, a job figured out later. The German fleet didn't even engage in regular exercises prewar to work out how to use its ships or inspire strong leadership; only one full scale fleet maneuver was ever held before Aug 1914.

With the I class Fisher was attempting to bring about major changes in the way the RN operated and fought after years of his personal study and lobbying, with Blucher and then Von Der Tan and later ships Germany was simply scaling up existing thinking within existing budget realities.

But I guess that at least against the weaker armored Invincibles/Indefatigables the 28cm guns were effective. Otherwise Von der Tann/ Moltke/ Seydlitz were faulty designs from the very start.

The guns were somewhat effective with new pattern shells introduced around IIRC 1911. With the ammunition that existed in 1907, not so much.

German emphasis on lighter faster firing guns goes back to the first modern steel battleships they built, which only had 240mm guns at a time when 12in was the British standard. This seemed like an okay idea because said guns were much cheaper and yet could fire several times faster, making the actual weight of fire favor the 240mm, and nobody had very workable AP shells. Indeed solid AP shot was still being embarked on many ships.

The problem is, this thinking did not scale up, ignoring the AP issue for the moment. Once salvo firing at long range became standard, ROF advantages cease to matter at all. The time delay for waiting to spot the splashes and calculate corrections is too large, at Jutland most ships fired about one round per gun per minute, much lower then the maximum rate of fire of even the slowest loading heavy guns.

Meanwhile since AP shells could now work, and hits would be fewer in number due to longer range, heavier long range hitting power would be dramatically more important. But these are all changes which effectively took place only after the dreadnought revolution itself began. Since it took about four years to design and field a new heavy gun design, the fact that German was already behind the curve on gun caliber meant it would be hard to catch up once the caliber race began.

[Sea Skimmer]

On a little further thought, it’s interesting to observe that the final ‘normal’ armored cruisers of the British and German fleets also show a huge disparity in firepower, if not particularly logical gun armaments on either side.

Scharnhorst has a broadside of six 21cm guns and three 15cm guns, the later having little armor piercing power. The 21cm guns are split four in turrets and two in casemates. Weight of broadside with and without the 15cm armament is 1692lb and 1428lb respectively.

For HMS Minotaur the broadside is four 9.2in and five 7.5in guns, weight of broadside with 9.2in only is 1520lb, with 7.5in included, weapons which had some armor piercing capability, 2,520lb. Pretty big disparity when you realize that the 7.5in gun could fire almost as fast as the 15cm gun and all British weapons were mounted in power worked turrets, while only four German 21cm guns are in turrets.

Armor wise the thicknesses are very similar in these two ships; though distributed differently because of the Germans 21cm casemate guns vs all turret armament of the British. This required that the Germans mount a thickly armored central casemate, while the British have heavily armored ammunition trunks and turrets all over the place.

Oh, and Blucher, manages to only have a 1904lb broadside. Still inferior to Minotaur! Though certainly much better from a fire control standpoint. That's kind of crazy, made me recheck my numbers, since Blucher is so much larger; Minotaur has a size advantage over Scharnhorst herself. German designers sure loved wing turrets.

We have to jump back to SMS Roon laid down in 1901 to get a German cruiser that comes off as equal or superior in firepower to contemporary British vessels. However at the time the British were deliberately building lightly armed ships because France and Russia themselves had been building large numbers of fairly lightly armed armed armored cruisers. German ships were not yet seen as a serious threat and the RN decided to favor numbers as policy.

[Simon_Jester]

What was the reason behind wing turrets, anyway? Was it that much of an obstacle to make the ship long enough to contain an adequate number of centerline turrets, and the necessary superstructure, without putting big heavy weights out on the wings of the ship and arbitrarily reducing the number of guns you could commit to a broadside?

[Starglider]

What was the reason behind wing turrets, anyway? Was it that much of an obstacle to make the ship long enough to contain an adequate number of centerline turrets

AFAIK it was more that superfiring turrets are harder than they look; it took a while for the RN to come up with a sighting hood design that wouldn't be damaged by gun blast from the turret above firing.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well, the sighting hood issue didn't stop the USN from mounting superfiring guns on South Carolina which was the first dreadnought type actually approved for construction. The USN just wasn't willing to steal guns and armor from an existing project and then declare a basin trial of the engines 'completion' to win naming rights. I do wonder what would have happened had she been finished first. Hard to think that 'South Carolina' would have caught on as a type name.

In any event, the story is a little more complex then that I think. The Germans like all powers were already thinking about new enhanced types of battleships before Dreadnought/South Carolina forced the issue. Some of these around 1903-04 period had uniform armaments of 21cm guns and were more or less battleship versions of what became Blucher. Logical enough if you expect 3000 yard battles. Italy after all actually built ships with just two 12in guns and a dozen 8in; and the British Lord Nelsons were similar levels of turret spam. This idea faded, in favor of 21cm wings and 28cm end armament, very like the Italian/British and some American ships.

When the Germans got word of Lord Nelson, which mounted very powerful 9.2in secondary weapons (far as medium guns go anyway) they threw out any thought of an all medium armament for good and were concentrating on a ship with eight 28cm guns, but in two end twins and four single wing turrets. Word of Dreadnought and the general trend of world thinking then saw the design scale up yet again to the armament we see actually used, the singles became twins.

Throughout this a huge pressure existed to hold down costs as well, the British Lord Nelsons were already rather expensive due to the high capability, so the jump to dreadnought in size and cost was limited. For the Germans Nassau ended up being a radical increase in size and cost over Deutschland, which were all and all unexceptional predreadnoughts. Something like a 40% increase in displacement and 60% increase in cost. This created pressure to hold down length. Also since this was all happening so rapidly, and designing ships in detail took so long in this era, pressure exists not to radically change the design concept as once work is started in earnest.

So it would seem that the blast issue was perhaps not dominating German thinking, the Germans were simply never thinking in terms of superfiring turrets at all and took a very evolutionary approach to the ships design, driven by expansions in the capabilities of foreign ships they had to reluctantly match at great cost. The Dreadnought type arrangement would have been longer, and required running steam lines directly through X turret magazine which is ballistically undesirable due to propellant heating, though making the required gunnery corrections for the affected turrets seems not to have been an undue problem in service. Annoying yes, but very possible. Length is a big deal in these ships because they have fully armored waterlines, making the ends heavy and expensive.

For the British wing turrets on HMS Dreadnought were very much chosen on the basis of blast interference, and positioned carefully on this basis. It then becomes rather silly that Invincible was built with turrets intended for cross deck firing, which always created horrendous blast problems; but Fisher was a bit mad and all, and I think in the I class cross deck firing was not taken very seriously in any case for her given the very narrow arc over which it was possible. Von Der Tan was better in this respect, but she was also bigger. My understanding is her gun layout is similar to the abortive 8 x 24cm gun cruiser considered alongside Blucher. Now on Neptune and Moltke, cross deck firing was everything (still got to limit length) and yet superfiring was possible... and yet... my gods are they just silly. I've never read much of anything on the design history of either one to explain it. Might be worth someone checking into brassys 1913 or so to see if it has any period notes on the subject. Most of the prewar volumes are on google books now.



And stupid me, Blucher had four 15cm guns on the broadside as well, but this raises her broadside weight to only 2,300lb, still inferior to Minotaur and as inferior as ever in defeating armor over about 3in thick. Her 15cm guns though were a new mark which at least was actually issued with an AP shell in the first place.

[BabelHuber]

To grossly oversimplify, a ship has four traits: armor, firepower, speed, and tonnage. To increase any of the first three, without trading off anything else, you have to accept heavier tonnage.

To make a ship survivable in line of battle it must have good armor, to make it able to withstand capital ship fire from the enemy line. To make it able to carry out the battlecruiser mission, it must have good speed, superior to a normal battleship of the era. Once you've made both those decisions, you are forced to either make your ship bigger, or make your ship lightly armed. The Germans chose the second option, accepting smaller-caliber guns and shells.

These are obvious technical restrictions.

But from what I thought so far, additionally the RN battlecruisers were real cruisers which needed long range and the capability to perform independent missions, too.

But the KM battlecruisers were designed to fight together with the fleet in the North Sea, so they didn't need these cruiser-capabilities. This means they could be honed-to-the-bone to fulfill their role as scouts/ second-class battleships.

I would expect that this also plays a role in ship design - wouldn't it have been possible for the KM to use the I-class as a template, remove the multi-mission capability and invest the according savings in tonnage to outfit their own design also with 30.5cm, but more armor?

A tactical role for these ships, was well, invented I think, they were built because of procurement politics first, a job figured out later. The German fleet didn't even engage in regular exercises prewar to work out how to use its ships or inspire strong leadership; only one full scale fleet maneuver was ever held before Aug 1914.

This seems like a moronic way of designing ships. Perhaps Tirpitz thought it is better to have these battlecruisers instead of having nothing. But this still doesn't explain the inbalanced design.

What was the reason behind wing turrets, anyway? Was it that much of an obstacle to make the ship long enough to contain an adequate number of centerline turrets, and the necessary superstructure, without putting big heavy weights out on the wings of the ship and arbitrarily reducing the number of guns you could commit to a broadside?

It is easy to say that wing turrets are a bad idea more than 100 years later.

Today the most famous battleships are the ones which fought in WW2. Once you are used to the looks of Bismarck, Hood, Yamato and Iowa, the original Dreadnought and the Nassaus/ Helgolands look weird and somehow 'wrong'.

But wing turrets were common on pre-dreadnoughts, so at the time people were used to this look.

Additionally, I think the KM considered the hexagon turret layout to have advantages:

- You have 3 turrets facing front and back instead of only two. You even can fire with all turrets if the enemy is behind and in front of you
- You can better fight enemies which are on starboard and on larboard (with 6 guns each instead of 4 guns each)
- If wing turrets on the one side are destroyed, you can turn the ship around and use the other turrets

Of course today we know that this is BS. Battles were fought primary over big distances with broadsides, so it is paramount to be able to fire at the enemy with all turrets. Having turrets facing in the wrong direction means having wasted tonnage and money for useless weapons.

But back then this was debated.

[Thanas]

It was actually considered a design need to have more turrets facing aft then front in the KM because the ships were required to run away more iirc.

As for the battlecruisers, the Navy was under very tight budgetary oversight. Unlike the RN Tirpitz could not manipulate the press to such an extent that a political campaign was possible. Better to have BCs than to have nothing.

[Simon_Jester]

These are obvious technical restrictions.

But from what I thought so far, additionally the RN battlecruisers were real cruisers which needed long range and the capability to perform independent missions, too.

All you need for range is slightly better accomodations and a bigger fuel tank- and you don't even need that much bigger a fuel tank, if you have a worldwide network of fueling stations which the British did.

That costs tonnage, but not massive amounts of tonnage unless you're trying to build a dedicated commerce raider that can sail 100000 km without refueling.

But the KM battlecruisers were designed to fight together with the fleet in the North Sea, so they didn't need these cruiser-capabilities. This means they could be honed-to-the-bone to fulfill their role as scouts/ second-class battleships.

Sort of, but in a real sense they weren't meant to be second-class battleships, they were just "uh... I guess we'd better design a big nasty cruiser, what do we want big nasty cruisers to look like?" Being able to survive at least a few shots from 13.5" shell fire, and presumably being immune to 6" and 8" guns on British cruisers and secondary predreadnought weapons, just happened to be the German idea of a "big nasty cruiser."

The armored cruisers of the pre-dreadnought era were explicitly meant to fight in line of battle, or some of them were- I suspect that insofar as the German battlecruisers were vaguely battleline-capable, it was because they were what the Germans got when they designed "like an armored cruiser, but faster!"

I would expect that this also plays a role in ship design - wouldn't it have been possible for the KM to use the I-class as a template, remove the multi-mission capability and invest the according savings in tonnage to outfit their own design also with 30.5cm, but more armor?

That would require them to exactly duplicate the detail design of the British ship, which they could not do. One of the hidden variables in warship design is that not everyone gets the same amount of performance out of the same tonnage; not all 40000-ton battleships or 20000-ton battlecruisers are equal. Different philosophies of armor layout can easily require hundreds of tons of armor plate to cover parts of the ship that another country might not bother with, different choices of gun layout can waste a lot of weight on random unnnecessary turrets, and so on.

The Germans had a very persistent problem with getting a well-armed capital ship on a given tonnage. It was even worse during World War Two, when the Germans had no experienced naval design establishment.

This seems like a moronic way of designing ships. Perhaps Tirpitz thought it is better to have these battlecruisers instead of having nothing. But this still doesn't explain the inbalanced design.

The unbalanced design, such as it was, is easily explained if the Germans were thinking "let's build a fast armored cruiser," instead of "let's build something for a specific mission role." And yes, it's kind of dumb, but it was also fairly common in this era. Since the German naval buildup was political in motivation (king and legislature wanted a fleet that could rival Britain's, and specified its size without specifying its role), that's not surprising.

It is easy to say that wing turrets are a bad idea more than 100 years later.

Today the most famous battleships are the ones which fought in WW2. Once you are used to the looks of Bismarck, Hood, Yamato and Iowa, the original Dreadnought and the Nassaus/ Helgolands look weird and somehow 'wrong'.

But wing turrets were common on pre-dreadnoughts, so at the time people were used to this look.

My critique is not that they 'look funny.' It's that having big steel weights hanging off the edge of the ship, instead of being safely over the keel, lowers stability, and means you have to put twice as many big heavy turrets on the ship to get the same addition to the broadside. There's a reason people stopped building them so shortly after the Dreadnought Revolution; they're actually not a good idea at all.

Additionally, I think the KM considered the hexagon turret layout to have advantages:

- You have 3 turrets facing front and back instead of only two. You even can fire with all turrets if the enemy is behind and in front of you

This is only an advantage if the enemy has crossed your T, in which case you should be engaged in a Gefechtskehrtwendung, not firing guns at him.

- You can better fight enemies which are on starboard and on larboard (with 6 guns each instead of 4 guns each)

Not without firing 28cm guns through your own ship's superstructure you can't.

http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprint ... leship.gif

Look at that image. There is NO angle for which more than four turrets can point at the same enemy. Please consult the actual turret layout of the ship before you say things like this.

- If wing turrets on the one side are destroyed, you can turn the ship around and use the other turrets

Of course today we know that this is BS. Battles were fought primary over big distances with broadsides, so it is paramount to be able to fire at the enemy with all turrets. Having turrets facing in the wrong direction means having wasted tonnage and money for useless weapons.

But back then this was debated.

Ahhhh, NOW the analysis shows up.

The real mistake was in not realizing just how much gun range had increased since Tsushima. For a battle like Tsushima, where combat ranges were a few thousand meters at most, it was realistic that enemy fast ships could steam around and hit your battleline from the other side. When battles are fought at 10000 meters this is not so likely; the enemy has farther to go to outmaneuver you.

[Thanas]

Simon, I really doubt that the Germans were worried so much about "smaller guns". Their 12/50 was - iirc - comparable to the British 13" in armor/piercing capabilities and the Baden was armed with 15" guns later on.

As to the idea of the German BCs being merely "larger and faster armored cruisers", that is pretty much non-sensical IMO or at the least superfluous. A larger and faster armored cruiser is a battlecruiser if you disregard things like gun layout, armament etc. The Von Der Tann was designed in response to the I-class and was not merely a continuation of Blucher. She sacrificed only 1" of main gun armament in exchange for being both faster and much more heavier armored.

Note that Tirpitz apparently wanted the ship to have much larger guns and to be faster as well (and not intended for the line of battle) but he was overruled.

[Scottish Ninja]

- You can better fight enemies which are on starboard and on larboard (with 6 guns each instead of 4 guns each)

Not without firing 28cm guns through your own ship's superstructure you can't.

http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprint ... leship.gif

Look at that image. There is NO angle for which more than four turrets can point at the same enemy. Please consult the actual turret layout of the ship before you say things like this.

I believe BabelHuber is saying that (as with the previous example) that if there are enemies to both port and starboard, three turrets can train out to starboard and three can train out to port, rather than two and two if you had a centerline turret arrangement with the same effective broadside.

[Simon_Jester]

Simon, I really doubt that the Germans were worried so much about "smaller guns". Their 12/50 was - iirc - comparable to the British 13" in armor/piercing capabilities and the Baden was armed with 15" guns later on.

Just because they didn't worry about it, doesn't mean it wasn't going to be a problem. Skimmer's comments comparing weight of broadside apply: even if the Germans were able to get greater theoretical armor penetration, the shells aren't going to do as much damage when they land on the enemy.

As to the idea of the German BCs being merely "larger and faster armored cruisers", that is pretty much non-sensical IMO or at the least superfluous. A larger and faster armored cruiser is a battlecruiser if you disregard things like gun layout, armament etc.

Fair enough- my impression is that the British pared down armor somewhat from the peak of the armored cruiser designs to get their battlecruisers, but I'm probably wrong.

I believe BabelHuber is saying that (as with the previous example) that if there are enemies to both port and starboard, three turrets can train out to starboard and three can train out to port, rather than two and two if you had a centerline turret arrangement with the same effective broadside.

Yes, which is realistic in a Tsushima environment, but not a post-Dreadnought one, and the people designing these ships KNEW that they were going to be fighting at longer engagement ranges.

Also, to get the ability to point six guns onto each of two targets on opposite sides, instead of four, you have to make the ship's armament 50% heavier while gaining nothing against a single opponent. For the same commitment of weight you could build a centerline ship with eight of the next heavier-caliber gun.

[Thanas]

Just because they didn't worry about it, doesn't mean it wasn't going to be a problem. Skimmer's comments comparing weight of broadside apply: even if the Germans were able to get greater theoretical armor penetration, the shells aren't going to do as much damage when they land on the enemy.

While your overall point is well taken, it should be noted that this does not hold true for earlier battleships which were quite equal in armament:
Weight of main armament per broadside:
Nassau class: 5328 lbs
Helgoland: 7152 lbs

Bellephoron: 6800
St Vincent: 6880

So you can see that before the British made the move to 13" guns weight of shell was comparable if not even dipping towards the German side. As for why the Germans did not move to 13.5 I do not know. They probably wanted to make the complete jump towards the 15" gun - it should be noted that the Bayern class BBs were supposed to be completed in 1915 and 16.

[Sea Skimmer]

So I've been very busy recently... finals and such.

The Germans slight superiority in gunpower was pretty short lived. HMS Neptune was laid down just a few months after SMS Helgoland, and HMS Orion a scant year later.

Budget limitations prevented any battleships with 35cm guns from being laid down in the relevant time frame, at least a few were put on paper . German ships were already bigger and more expensive and that was hurting the building program in the last few years of peace. By the time any new ships were approved the British had already forced the issue with 15in gun ships. Interestingly Mackensen was originally a design with six 38cm guns, forced by budgetary limits on size, but the design series evolved into one with eight 35cm guns because six guns was felt to be too few for such a large hull. The British thought otherwise and built Renown; which also had a lot more installed power on more or less the same displacement. Amusingly even after the Renowns had massively increased armor they still proved over a knot faster then design speed. Shows had bad people still were at estimating ship performance in that era; as they didn't make grossly over design power unlike some earlier turbine ships. The hull form just worked better then expected.

Size/cost restrictions in the face of heavy armor requirements also meant that most of the German 42cm projects also had only six guns, and some only four as battlecruisers. Later of course all such talk was thrown aside and the L20a emerged which was merely like 15,000 tons larger then Bayern but its designs knew it had no chance in hell of being built. Also still painfully inferior to the British letter series postwar studies made just a few years later. Send it against an L3 with thirteen inch thick deck armor...

Ersatz Yorck vs Hood is an interesting one, the ships have some pretty similar armoring all and all.

It is also interesting in general to see just how the British were willing to compromise to control costs on the early dreadnoughts. They traded away heavy caliber secondaries and full length torpedo bulkheads, the later can weigh ~1000 tons or more so its not small deal, in favor of relying on escorts for torpedo protection for example. War experience seems to make this a justified decision as no dreadnought was sunk by torpedo attack, and only one ever even hit by a torpedo that I can think of. They did have patches of armor over the magazines to prevent explosions. I suppose for the unbalanced German fleet this would have been far less acceptable.

Really right up until the 15in guns the RN designs were all about compromise and limiting size increase, and then, they kind of threw it all out the window and accepted a big cost increase for the R class and QE classes, though they also certainly got what they paid for. The Germans no compromise on anything but gun caliber attitude just doesn't seem to pay off at all. The German ships were not easily sunk no, and never would be, but none of them show the kind of superiority needed to beat an enemy with superior numbers, and yet they cost more on average, sometimes by a lot, sometimes by a little. It is perhaps telling that when Japan set out to purposefully design a battleship which could beat two to one odds, Yamato, they ended up which a ship that weighed nearly as much as its two expected opponents put together.

The Russians had some interesting ideas on unit superiority, mainly they felt that extended battle lines could not be brought into action successfully and thus while you needed a certain critical mass of numbers, more then about eight ships in line would not be able to engage each other at one time. Thus an inferior fleet did not need radical unit superiority to be able to come out of an engagement on favorable terms. Jutland both supports and refutes this concept at the same time. In effect superior units could pull off a tactical success when outnumbered, but it was only going to work out if you could successfully ran away afterwards. That's no way to win a naval war unless you manage to do it repeatedly. The side problem being that the Germans simply did not prove able to sink British ships via concentrated gunfire, only by induced explosions, which is nothing to rely upon. Without that your screwed. Campbells book has a lot of stuff on time of repair of the ships on both sides, one or two of those German wrecks took a long time to make fit for action, but in general fairly extensively damaged ships were put right in a short period. Only sinking counting.

Amusingly Yamato herself was slightly predicated on not so much induced explosions, but scoring clusters of underwater hits which would at least knock an enemy ship out of line.

[Thanas]

There were very close misses by torpedoes at Jutland and it might just as easily not have been Pommern but any of the dreads that were hit.

[Sea Skimmer]

Sure, but the overall hit rates were still very low and more then enough torpedoes were fired to show a trend, nearly 200 in all, with about 5% hits for the British with the aid of a major night action, and 3% for the Germans. A good portion of these were on each sides lighter ships engaged in screening actions with each other. The true hit rates might be even worse, as the expenditure records for each side may not be entirely complete and one or two hits are iffy.

The basic point, torpedo attack was a threat that could only really be managed by a screen. Every capital ship hit had a heavy caliber secondary battery, which might just be chance, but it still points to the basic issue. In daylight torpedo attack is likely to be delivered outside of effective range of said major caliber secondary guns. At night its a crapshoot. Simply by opening fire with secondary weapons a capital ship gives away its position, and using searchlights is worse without a firm target in sight. The British night torpedo attack was not delivered in a very coordinated fashion, but the ships got to within under a thousand yards in many cases, so hell so did HMS Black Prince. At this range secondary fire was effective, but little 88mm guns seem to have worked as well as 15cm weapons at that point. Considering how weakly but even destroyers of the time were, I've wondered before if the 53mm revolvor cannon used in the late 19th century might not have been the best torpedo defense weapons for the battle, if updated to 'modern' standards of course.

Interestingly one British destroyer was not disabled even by a 17cm hit from a predreadnought, while several suffered serious damage from just one or two hits by 88mm and 105mm fire. So the British, while much criticized for it and becoming doubters themselve, were probably not on bad grounds by saving the weight of heavy secondary guns on dreadnoughts and battlecruisers.

[Thanas]

Didn't the 17cm hit fail to detonate and "just" blew away the upper works by blast force?

I wasn't talking that much about secondary caliber as I think that the heavy German focus on secondary weapons wasn't worth much and in some cases - like the WWII secondary armament - useless. I am however more iffy about the torpedo bulkheads as the added protection might have been worthwhile against shells detonating/striking the underwater portions of the ship.

[Simon_Jester]

The odds of that happening seem slim enough... wouldn't you be better off spending those thousand tons on extra deck armor in that case?

[Thanas]

iirc, at least three German capital ships were struck by (unexploded) shells below the waterline at Jutland though, with at least one hit causing massive flooding.

[Sea Skimmer]

Such hits will almost always be duds by nature, anything else is totally freakish, unless you go like Japan in WW2 and design your shells to do nothing well except hit underwater. Japan then managed all of one such hit in all of WW2 that anyone can find evidence for. The fuse delays on normal ammunition are too short to allow a useful underwater trajectory against a ship with decent depth of belt armor. Also the noses are totally the wrong shape to do it right.

Massive flooding was caused on Lutzow by a CPC round bursting on her forward belt just about at the waterline, covered by the bow wake, and converting said belt into a mass of fragmentation which gutted the bow compartmentation, the single most damning support of all or nothing armor I'm aware of. I 'm not specifically aware of a true underwater trajectory hit which caused serious damage below the belt. The German response to Lutzow and other bow damage was to thicken the bow armor to as much as 250mm on post Jutland designs.

In any event a torpedo bulkhead will not stop such a hit if it detonates. It may or may not stop a dud round from going further inboard depending on remaining velocity. German bulkheads were 20mm on earliest dreadnoughts, 30mm, 40mm or 50mm depending on the ship and position for the bulk of them, 50mm was only found over wing turret magazines to try to makeup for the thinner TDS. None of this will do much against a heavy shell going off against it.

As an additional problem German ships never had a holding bulkhead behind the armor, the armor was the holding bulkhead, so even slight damage to the armor will cause flooding anyway. Not the best concept against torpedoes but the Germans also wanted the armor to also act as a fragmentation screen against spall from the deck slopes, and that meant it had to be as far inboard as possible. German battleships in WW2 were also this way though with 45mm bulkheads, until you reach some of the later silly H-class designs which finally had multiple armor bulkheads.

British ones were 25mm or 38mm typically but some HMS Hood had a 38mm and 19mm bulkhead. On the other hand some of the battlecruisers with only armor patches over the magazines had as much as 2.5in plate, as in HMS Tiger. So actually the British limited protection concept comes closest to defeating underwater shells, made possible by needing to armor such small areas but, I still would not expect it to be much help because its a fairly elastic grade of steel. Also its exposed to a shell bursting just beyond the edge of the armor patch, I don't think they had a box. IIRC they built one or two ships with 3in armor patches on wing turrets but I’m not certain on that. 3in would be about the utter minimal to start thinking about resisting a major caliber shell blast, or at least limiting perforation to the nose cap only.

Basically the point being, this is not an issue a normal torpedo bulkhead is going to be a serious help against. If you fear underwater shell hits be prepared to add a large amount of additional weight, at least over magazines. Yamato had an armor bulkhead which was at its minimal, 80mm thick, and most of its height was over 100mm. US Iowa class was not far behind it over magazines. Making bulkheads proof against shellfire takes tremendous amounts of weight and always compromises anti torpedo protection. Only Montana and some of the postwar Soviet designs had particularly satisfactory arrangements for this purpose, and at no minor cost, as they had both elastic and rigid armor bulkheads, sloped, and placed them well onboard but not as the holding bulkhead. This is part of the reason why the Soviet Project 82 battlecruisers for example ended up the the size of treaty battleships and yet only mount 9 x 305mm guns and armor no thicker then 225mm, 180mm angled belt.

[BabelHuber]

Really right up until the 15in guns the RN designs were all about compromise and limiting size increase, and then, they kind of threw it all out the window and accepted a big cost increase for the R class and QE classes, though they also certainly got what they paid for. The Germans no compromise on anything but gun caliber attitude just doesn't seem to pay off at all. The German ships were not easily sunk no, and never would be, but none of them show the kind of superiority needed to beat an enemy with superior numbers, and yet they cost more on average, sometimes by a lot, sometimes by a little. It is perhaps telling that when Japan set out to purposefully design a battleship which could beat two to one odds, Yamato, they ended up which a ship that weighed nearly as much as its two expected opponents put together.

AFAIK designing battleships so they could compete against a numerical superiour opponent does not make sense. As the saying goes, quantity is a quality on its own.

This site explains the N squared law with - quite simplified, but IMO interesting - examples: +http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-076.htm

According to this site, basically Tirpitz' idea of using ships with less firepower but more armor could have worked, but only under the following conditions:

- Numerically equal opponent
- Guns have less firepower, but the same range

Once the opponent has greater range or more ships, the fleet with the tougher ships will likely lose the battle. Since GB had both in WW1, the German strategy could not work.

[Sea Skimmer]

Another more formal name for N squared is Lanchester's Square Law FYI, if you want to look up more about it.

Insufficient range wasn't really a huge factor in say, 1913, but it certainly grew in significance as the war progressed and both sides constantly modified gun mounts and in some cases ammunition for increased range.

Smaller guns, when small is 28cm, can still shoot mighty far if you have enough elevation and a good shellform, the problem is that hitting power vs armor drops off faster then heavier rounds. The Germans were lucky most dreadnoughts were built with people thinking 15 degree elevation was all you'd ever want. This was done because it let turrets be more compact, which saved serious weight.

Also I remembered to dredge up my low res armor diagram of HMS Tiger showing her internal magazine armor patches. I have no comparable chart for a German battlecruiser or dreadnought. Its easy to find traverse cross sections that show bulkhead armor, but its usually not marked on lengthwise plans of warship armoring. JANES fighting ships plans sometimes show it, but a number of it's diagrams are suspect in that respect.