Thiaria: Other People's ships

Garlicdesign

Post subject: Re: Thiaria: Other People's ships

Posted: November 24th, 2014, 9:23 pm

Posts: 1060
Joined: December 26th, 2012, 9:36 am
Location: Germany

Hello again!

The next one actually is a real world never-built design, the final appearance of the planned 1914 battleships for the Royal Dutch Navy. The drawing is based upon a sketch by Breyer of the Krupp Germania Design 803 submitted to the Dutch Navy in 1914, but never built due to the war. Backstory and names are - as usual - entirely made up by me.

An incident early in 1913 - when the japanese cruiser Azuma chased a chinese gunboat which was accused of having turned pirate into NEI waters and proceeding to sink it while blatantly ignoring an old dutch cruiser challenging her - showed the Dutch just how helpless they were even against old japanese ships. Right wing media blew up the incident all out of proportion, and the hotly disputed plan to build a force of four battleships for the NEI (for starters; up to nine were considered necessary) was approved in the summer of 1913. The Germaniawerft design was chosen because that yard was most forthcoming to dutch wishes to build only one ship - tentatively named Staten Generaal (name of the Dutch parliament) - in Germany and the other three on durch yards: Willem de Zwijger (named for Prince William of Orange) at Nederlandse Scheepsbouw Maatschappij in Amsterdam; Vrijheid (Freedom) at Koninklijke Maatschappij de Schelde in Flushing and Gouden Leeuw (Golden Lion) at the Rotterdamsche Droogdok Maatschappij in Rotterdam.

The german design provided for a long flush-decked hull of relatively fine lines fore and aft with a typical german icebreaker bow and a very pronounced sheer forward, not unlike the contemporary Derfflinger-class battlecruisers. It carried eight 350mm Krupp-type guns (later substituted with 356mm Bofors guns after Germany could no longer deliver) in superimposed twin turrets fore and aft. They were provided with a more advanced fire-control system than contemporary German dreadnoughts, necessitating two tripod masts. Armour emphasized maximum protected area at the expense of thickness (only 250mm at the CWL); the deck armour however was increased from 75mm to 100mm during construction, this being a competitive figure at that time. The power of the three-shaft machinery was increased from the specified figure of 38.000hp to 51.750hp (three AEG-Curtis turbine sets of 17.250hp each, license produced in the Netherlands for the domestically built ships) during construction, allowing for a speed of 24 knots, two knots more than specified; the nine boilers burned only oil. The funnels were spaced far apart and a little too close to the masts, whose very great height however kept the fire control tops reasonably clear of smoke interference. Access to the aft fire control top however was badly hampered by smoke from the aft funnel and only safely possible if the ship was stopped or the aft boilers were shut down; the aft fire control position was not used very often.

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The first two - Staten Generaal and Willem de Zwijger - were laid down in 1913, the next pair in 1914. From the beginning, steel and armour plate was acquired from a multitude of sources, namely Germany, Sweden, Thiaria and Belgium. When the first world war started, Thiaria strove to massively increase her steel production in order to get her steel industry ready for mass orders should an opportunity to enter the war arise; they took over Germany's and Belgium's deliveries at rather benign conditions. Construction of Staten Generaal in Germany was cancelled almost fortwith, because her oil-burning machinery was worthless for Germany as long as it was cut off from oil supplies during the war; Willem de Zwijger and Vrijheid however were proceeded with, although the projected building time of 28 months could not possibly be met. Gouden Leeuw was cancelled in February 1915 and broken up, the materiel being diverted to the other two. A deal with Bofors to develop a 356mm gun to replace the German 350mm pieces was struck early in 1915; the Swedes were eventually able to deliver 24 guns between 1919 and 1922, and they also supplied the 150mm secondaries. Willem de Zwijger was launched in June 1916, after Thiarian supplies had dried up; she then lay unfinished in Amsterdam throughout the rest of the war. Vrijheid's construction was suspended in mid-1916 at 80% launch readiness. After the first world war, public feeling in the Netherlands was to get rid of the ships and trust the League of Nations to provide for eternal peace, but the Dutch were soon sobered by Japan's battleship building frenzy, which threatened to destabilize the whole far east. Construction of both ships resumed in March 1919. Willem de Zwijger was ready for trials in November 1920, Vrijheid in December 1921, just in time to survive the Washington fleet disarmament treaty of February 1922. They ranked among the fastest battleships of the world (together with the - however much larger and stronger - Queen Elizabeths and Nagatos) and aroused great interest as the only surviving examples of German high-end shipbuilding technology of that era. In the following years, they alternately were deployed to the NEI, symbolizing Dutch willingness to fight for their colonies; because they however remained the only Dutch battleships and were not further reinforced, they could not hope to be more than symbols of defiance in case of war. Further refits and the history of their employment in WWII will follow in a later post.

Greetings
GD

Last edited by Garlicdesign on February 14th, 2017, 6:42 pm, edited 4 times in total.

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