Comments by "Iain Mc" (@iainmc9859) on "Austro-Hungarian Battleship Designs of WW1 - Guide 392 (NB)" video.

I preface this by saying I effectively know nothing about the Austro-Hungarian Empire in this period. What I'm wondering is what resources came from overseas to the AHE that these ships were designed to protect and would the money simply have been better spent on landbound defences on the Adriatic coast. Simply put, was this just a vanity project by another old empire limping along.
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@bluelemming5296 Thanks for that, but essentially by mid WWI none of the trade/ports that the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica lists that Trieste was engaged in trading for/with was any longer available to them. If there was any northern Levant trade presumably that would have been through Ottoman territory. Thus we're thrown back on protecting the Croatian coast from Italian/British/French landings, which is still probably easier and more cheaply done by big guns around the deep water ports and lesser sized guns along shallow beaches. I suppose that if you flip it AH were maybe thinking about the use of the battleships offensively rather than in purely defensive terms, but by this point of the war that's probably semi-delusional. As I said I know diddly squat about AHE by this point (my period is really C17/18th) but I feel seagoing battleships is somewhat financial overkill.
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@bluelemming5296 Yeah, I sort of missed that point ... they were battleships on paper only 😐
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