Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Drydock - Episode 078" video.

  1. Regarding the building spree that Britain would've had to do had all of the pre-dreadnoughts for some reason been scrapped immediately before WW1, one other source for an extra BB would be the Brazilian Riachuelo. She was scheduled for laying down at Elswick on September 10, 1914, and thus ended up being delayed and ultimately cancelled. Had Britain been in sudden desperate need of more battleships, obviously building what was essentially a slightly better Queen Elizabeth would be an obvious choice.
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  2. Yeah, the Washington Naval Treaty considered the entire British Empire to be a single nation, despite many parts of the empire being fully self-governing and having their own separate navies.
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  3. If there were no Revenge class and 4 additional Queen Elizabeths, that would also mean that Britain gets to keep one additional capital ship of another class under the Washington Naval Treaty. Most likely that would be Lion or Princess Royal. This would in turn also mean that Britain gets to keep one additional ship when the London Naval Treaty causes the next round of scrapping. Which probably means Tiger gets to survive into WW2. A refitted Tiger would essentially give the Royal Navy a better version of the Kongos. She'd be an ideal ship for escorting CVs and hunting German commerce raiders. (I've always liked Tiger and found it unfortunate she didn't last to get a Renown-style refit. Which interestingly enough probably would've involved replacing the 13.5" guns with 14" had she lasted in WW2. The British 14" guns were actually designed to be able to work in the 13.5" turrets, because at one point there was consideration of using the demilitarized training ship Iron Duke to test fire them.)
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  4. Now if it was the Renown and Courageous classes that got cancelled while all 4 Admirals were built, that would indeed give 4 very large and powerful capital ships with tonnage well beyond the treaty limits to get grandfathered in. At the same time, the raw number of capital ships in British service would have to be less because the limit was a combined 525,000 tons for all British capital ships. Hood's full 42,670 ton standard displacement counted toward Britain's limit, and the same would be true of her 3 sister ships. Which probably would've been slightly heavier due to improvements made to their design before they were cancelled. While this would have some obvious disadvantages (fewer hulls to spread around, while the Empire hasn't gotten any smaller), it was really only in terms of cruisers that Britain was looking to build relatively smaller ships than other nations in order to achieve greater numbers. When it comes to sending capital ships around the Empire, 4 Admiral class would actually be ideal due to their greater speed allowing them to get across the empire in less time. However, one issue is that the British might not get the concession to build the Nelson class. That concession of being able to build 2 battleships during the "building holiday" was to compensate for Japan keeping Mutsu and the US keeping Colorado and West Virginia. The Royal Navy didn't have any of their own partially completed capital ships at the time that could similarly be allowed to finish, and also lacked any 16-inch gun vessels. But if they've got 4 43,000 ton behemoths with 15" guns instead of just 1 like in reality, I doubt Japan and America would be so willing to let the Royal Navy also build 2 new BBs while nobody else is allowed to. Another thing this scenario brings up is, what would be the impact on British aircraft carrier development? Furious in particular was fairly important to the Royal Navy's early development in that field. On the other hand, even with resources freed up by not building the Renowns I'm not sure if it would actually have been possible, given when construction on the class started, to have all 4 Admirals already complete by the time the treaty negotiations began. In which case a likely scenario is that in addition to Hood, only Rodney gets completed as a battlecruiser while Anson and Howe potentially get converted into aircraft carriers. In which case this is actually very beneficial to to Royal Navy aircraft carrier development, since they get their own counterpart to the American Lexington class. In reality the Royal Navy was unable to take advantage of the treaty provision that allowed conversion of incomplete capital ships into 33,000 ton carriers (the limit on carrier size otherwise being 27,000 tons) the way America and Japan did, because they lacked any suitable hulls under construction to convert (the G3 class had only been ordered, never laid down, and it might not have been possible to reduce such a large ship's displacement all the way down to 33,000 tons anyway). But if a pair of half-built Admiral class are sitting there on the slipways, that becomes an incredibly obvious choice.
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  5. Yeah, the Nassaus weren't really a design that taught Germany anything. They were merely a rushjob to get out a response to Dreadnought more quickly instead of taking the time to design something better. The Nassaus also weren't disastrously bad battleships or anything, just very inefficient designs.
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  6.  @bkjeong4302  The thing is, during the 1920s nobody had any confidence that carriers would be able to avoid being attacked by surface units, particularly fast cruisers. The 8" guns on Lexington and Saratoga were meant to be purely defensive.
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