Shipbucket

I have to agree, her armor is too thin to allow her on the battleline. OTOH she'd make an interesting (if expensive) raider...

What would she raid? I don't believe that has been British naval policy since Drake

I think you guys who are saying 6" guns will 'hound' Incomparable better have a read of its proposed statistics:


General characteristics

Displacement: 46,000 long tons (46,738 t) standard
Length: 1,000 ft (304.8 m)
Beam: 104 ft (31.7 m)
Draught: 24 ft (7.3 m) (at deep load)
Installed power: 180,000 shp (134,226 kW)
Propulsion: Brown-Curtis geared steam turbines, Yarrow boilers
Speed: 35 knots (65 km/h; 40 mph)
Range: 24,000 nautical miles (44,000 km; 28,000 mi) at 10 knots (19 km/h; 12 mph)
Armament:
3 × 2 – BL 20-inch (508 mm) guns
5 × 3 – QF 4-inch (102 mm) guns
9 × 1 – QF 3-pounder guns

8 × 1 – 18-inch (450 mm) torpedo tubes
Armour: Belt: 11 in (279 mm)
Decks: 4 in (102 mm)
Barbettes: 14 in (356 mm)

A full read of the Wiki entry may also help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Incomparable

Incomparable was never meant to stand in the line of battle, it was designed like all Fishers battlecruisers, to 'scout', be the eyes of the fleet. To be able to brush aside the enemies scouting forces and lay eyes on the enemy fleet. The ship was armoured well enough to fulfil that role. Even had Incomparable been built it would have been superseded by the catapult launched and carrier borne aircraft for scouting duties.

An 11" belt was deemed thick enough to keep out the 12"-13.8" guns that the Admiralty believed were being fitted to the German battlecruisers in 1915-16, when Incomparable was first mooted.

In theory, yes she was to scout ahead of the fleet, however there was never any real understanding in the British Admiralty what to do with them after the found something. If you will recall Beaty's squadron of battle cruisers was ordered to join the van of Jellocoe's dreadnoughts at Jutland and nearly got shot to pieces. The problem is that any ship with battleship guns will be put in the line of battle at some point.

"I have 20-inch guns and you're telling me I can't join the battleline? Try and stop me!"

That attitude got 3 battle cruisers sunk at Jutland and destroyed the Hood and almost destroyed the Prince of Wales. Any ship is vulnerable to any unplanned weakness. Look at the oklahoma and West Virginia at Pearl Harbor. Even when rebuilt 6 or7 torpedoes at once is not what is prepared for.

Agreed, but any commander with capital ship guns isn't going to accept being told to stay out of the fight.

And the US BB's were not at Condition Zed that Sunday which didn't help matters any.

Well, I really think that Jackie Fisher was a victim of erroneous thought. He had the right idea about single caliber main armament, but being the biggest didn't mean having the best. Not one German ship ever exploded in battle and all German battleships and battlecruisers sank with their shafts turning. The HMS Lion was disabled twice at Dogger Bank and at Jutland from just one or 2 hits.

As much as I hesitate to wade into this... Jackie Fisher was an eccentric genius. Unlike a lot of Admirals, he understood politics and economics - or at least how to win wars.

Britain could not afford the ruinous sort of building race they actually got into into before WWI, and assuredly could not afford a long attritional war. She needed local naval dominance when she chose, and to decisively win battles when she had to fight them. This required the ability to hit something hard enough to where it stopped twitching, and enough speed to ensure said ship could get within range of her guns. This was the only method, of very mobile local area dominance, under which the Empire could be afforded. His idea that a ship had only fire her guns rapidly to ensure hits at range was fallacy, but his not grasping the technical problems involved does not diminish his understanding of the geostrategic problem. The battlecruiser must be seen in this light, and the aberrations of Jutland (caused by, what is at this point, rather unambiguously) hits on turrets leading to exposed powder charges igniting and causing catastrophic cordite flash due to a breakdown in ammunition handling safety protocols.

Fisher's logic was let down by the technology of the time - long range gunfire just wasn't accurate enough for Incomparable to hold herself harmlessly out of range and beat an enemy into scrap, and the question of what was to happen if an enemy was able to contest even your concentrated force was left unanswered - but it does a dis-service to the man to not understand his intellectual framework, just as it is a dis-service to the Royal Navy to not understand the design trade-offs involved. Were many RN battlecruisers badly designed? Certainly, Indefatigable's engine room being large enough to likely founder the ship from a single torpedo hit is one of them. Could a German battlefleet have any hope of fighting in the North Atlantic? No. Their habitability was atrocious, they rolled like bathtub toys, and Moltke only made it to the US on her pre-war visit by packing her secondary casemates and passageways to the brim with coal.

If you want to talk in off-the-cuff assertions, then, yes, three battlecruisers exploded... due to horrible tactical handling and a complete breakdown in ammunition safety protocols. If you want to talk about Lion being disabled, then yes, having her armor plates punched in, saltwater contamination of boiler feedwater, and dynamo breakdowns can happen to any ship. British ships were not perfect... But as far as I recall, no heavy shell during the First World War ever penetrated more than nine inches of ship armor in an intact condition. The Fifth Battle Squadron at Jutland certainly discomfited the High Seas Fleet when they opened fire at a range which the Germans were physically incapable of replying, and if their shells had actually functioned like the later-war Greenboy type, the consequences to the High Seas Fleet would have been locally catastrophic.

Did Fisher's ideas work? No. But they came a lot closer to cutting the geostrategic Gordian knot that the British Empire was facing before the Great War than anyone else's.

This is however not the place for this, and Off Topic or General Discussion might be a better place.

"Voyager989"
A very good summing up of the whole British BCs, I wish I could write that well !! The earlier BC where really a logical extension of the ACRs that the British need for their World wide obligations, No British admiral was going to leave their firepower behind when he was going face up to the High Seas Fleet, losing wasn't a option. I am sure they understood some off weakness's of their BCs, but a battle like Jutland will expose weakness that despite the best will/engineering of the time can't be foresee.

Graham