Austro-Hungarian Battleship Designs of WW1 - Guide 392 (NB) 

The place where I'd work uses a former Essex classes steam turbine to power process equipment. How common is this? Are there parts of ships that have been scrapped that live on in some random factory or plant?

The current notoriety of Yamato as the supposed symbol of the IJN, whether it be in a positive or negative light, is in stark contrast to how she was actually viewed during the war as a result of most Japanese civilians not knowing of her existence, with Nagato being the true symbol of the IJN all the way to the Japanese surrender. In your view, how has Yamato suddenly becoming famous, and often being incorrectly assumed to have historically been iconic, affected our understanding of both the ship herself and WWII naval history in general?

during the unification of the German States there was this idea of "grosser Deutchland" in which the then-Austrian empire in the post Austro-Prussian war join the German empire outright. If they had gone for this, my question is how would this have impacted Mediteranian? with the former Austrian fleet now the Kaisar marine's Mediterranean fleet and no longer held back by compromises that plagued Austro-Hungarian fleet building efforts, would such a force be even recognizable by the time WW1 roles around? and do you think such a force could be a greater threat to the British Mediterranean squadron?

Why very few 32-A-23 main armament schemes? More guns per salvo compared to four twins, while allowing half-salvos vs the three triples.

A friend of mine is writing an alternate history story that involves a post-war Royal Navy still possessing battleships and battlecruisers. She wants to know if the UK were able to keep its capital ships (specifically the QEs, Nelsons, KGVs, Vanguard and Renown) after WW2, all economic issues aside, what type of service life would they have had and, in your opinion, how much longer could they have potentially been in commission. Would their designs have allowed them to accommodate the more modern equipment, engines and weapons the Royal Navy would use in future or would they have gone the same way as the North Carolinas and South Dakotas. Similarly, what would’ve happened to the Lion class had they been built and to Hood if she had survived and undergone her refit.

The man who painted names on the sides of ships must have been pleased they used initials for that bit.

@@bigblue6917 he got pay per letter😉

Then "Csásári és Királyi Haditengerészet" and then we only have 9 more official languages (albeit several of them Slavic, with a high degree of similarity).

I don't know why but I just love hearing that name

@bigblue6917 The one I feel sorry for is the person painting Italian Destroyer names. Though to avoid that they did abbreviate them, or the ship might not have been long enough!

For me it was Oklahoma rolling over.

For me it was Battle360's 'Vengeance at Midway' episode

How about some good old crossing the T ?

Mine was seeing photographs of the WW1 Blucher rolling over.

Man I feel old. I only had books with pictures and those were like 50s books that are now wildly inaccurate.

They did prior to WW1.

The British: "Guys, could we scale back to 14 inches to save costs? Guys?"

@@maxxon99 The Japanese: "18 inch!!! 18!!! Aaaaarhg!!!!"

They were already bleeding bad in 1917 when all these ersatz-beauties were concocted. Food was in such short supply that they had to demobilize second-line K+K troops to save rations. Wholesale desertion of Czech formations to Russia and later France helped a bit... but not for long.

@@jmi5969get it because they were HUNGARY

“It was an enchanting old ruin, but I never managed to see it again.”

@@jmi5969 those desertions happened rather in the beginning of the war , Czech units were efficient on the italian front in 1917

@@jaketakahashi7962 💯

They were probably hoping that they'd be able to hold the Italians back and either the Germans could pull a victory or they could negotiate a favourable peace. There was still hoe for the empire until the death of the Kaiser. Even then, his successor was planning lots of reforms, just too late. After all, they'd achieved their major war aims of defeating Serbia and Russia, albeit with lots of German help.

Totally agree! THX, greetings from Linz!!!

@@daplanki7598 Thank you. I've never been to Europe, let alone Linz, but he talked about his life growing up there fairly often. I was raised to honor my elders and listened when they spoke. I like to think that my interest in history has been enriched by talking to older generations. The lives they led has me given insights into what we were taught in the history books.

america: **drools**

Glad I am not the only one.

[oompah 'Fortunate Son' intensifies]

That's because you're weak and are incapable of recognising mad genius

* *looks at username* * ... ... are you... W I D E ?

@@Erdanya yes, but not in the way you mean

1867 to 1918.

@@shauny2285 To be fair, it existed in mostly the same shape and form since about the year 1600, it just underwent significant political reforms in 1867.

​@@praevasc4299It had slight changes quite often throughout its history, but I'd still use the year 1526 (though there was a very significant change a bit later on where it got divided into two separate parts) as basically the point of where the monarchy became what it would be until it's dissolution.

Which part of AH?

And no Kamchatka to ask if anyone saw them.

"Do you see torpedo boats?!"

In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war.

It's part of the Five Minute Guide series. We got bonus time!

It is a NB so how much does it actually warrant?

It's a 5 minute guide. Correct at your will.

​@westcoaststacker569 NB, What If, is a significant part of my subscription.

There was a fair bit of design work, of some fairly forward thinking nature, most of it grounded in existinflg technology, but the industrial capacity to seriously pursue it could never be spared. I have no doubt in the event of a victory gor the central powers some of these would have been constructed, but how much of a porpouse they could have served was questionable.

Is Austro-Hungarian, many of their empire major ports now the part of Italy and Balkan coasts.

The Viribus Unitis is pretty awesome even if it has crap AA capability

I reckon they could cover up to T8 with these.

@@Joshua-fi4jiWhy not? The Russians have T10's

@@GordonHouston-Smith I meant they have real designs up to T8. They would likely make something up for T9/T10, much like the Italian line. Only Kremlin is completely fictional for the Russians.

@@Joshua-fi4ji I get your point, but....Having designs powered by unicorns and attcking with flights of dragons, whilst your ship is crewed with pixies is different from having ships built or even being capable of being built. +1 though:-)

While I completely agree, the Italians from 1866-1943 were not very much better. Lissa, the Prussi-Austrian war, Libya, Abyssinia, North Africa & the 11 battles of the Isonzo were not exactly great. Even when they won it was at huge cost in men, material, money & morale.

It's a Trapp!

You know what is crazy, Drac has become the gold standard for naval information. The number of places I have seen "Go ask Drac" when people have been debating the advantages or disadvantages of various battleship designs lol

Triple screws are underpowered and risk of losing more power when they struck/hit (there was the time they want to combine diesel and turbine with three screws layout this was abandon because diesel engines still new and not yet ripe for using), the following German BC and fast battleship are using 4 screws for more power.

St. István had triple screws, and has shown issues compared to her classmates with four, so it was a lessons learned thing.

@@egoalter1276 St Istvan have two screws, with more powerful propulsion give her a slight above her sister-ships.

@@NguyenThanh-gs5zv Seems I was wrong, I did rememb er it had fewer screws.

It have nothing to do with hull restrictions, the reasons they choose twin over triple for weight reasons and better stability, one of the Esartz Monarch preliminaries (Project X) have triple over twins, one advantage of triple super-firing twin was better protection (smaller turret meaning more armor volume around the hull).

Wide Tom's Bean Boats

I've seen that on other ships but I can't recollect which.

Even Italian fast battleship like F.Caracciolo-class deck armor was only 50mm thick, the 40mm deck on Kuk BB and BC are probably (my assumption) because they never intended to leave Adriatic Sea where close range battle are more likely, deck striking are minimal and beside their deck armor weakness, these project studies are pretty balanced designs Kuk approach with mix of German and British influences, they can't go bigger because the empire lack of large drydocks and their shipyards have low capacities to handle larger ships (but they did ask German to deliver one 40000 tons floating dock).

he has about 173 fletchers left he can make individual videos for, and thats just the one class.

Presumably the next step is to start the '20 minute guide to warships', which will go into a bit more detail on each ship ...

It's easy when sitting at a computer to forget that the sea is not a flat featureless mathematical space. You can have bad weather conditions lasting for days on end. This can allow ships to unexpectedly meet at very close ranges. There are other circumstances where this can happen, such as a ship emerging from a smoke screen, or a ship hiding behind an island, or a smaller vessel hiding behind a seemingly innocent larger vessel, a submarine surfacing, or just an encounter at night. It's been too long since I looked at WW1 in detail, but certainly in WW2 there were some encounters like this. For example, the German Cruiser Admiral Hipper used her secondaries on the British destroyer Glowworm when she emerged from a smoke screen - Glowworm would actually still get close enough to ram! Capital ships used their secondaries on a number of occasions during the Solomon Islands fighting, which mostly took place at night. One one occasion a US destroyer (Laffey) was so close to a Japanese capital ship (Hiei) that the Japanese ship could not depress even it's secondaries far enough to hit the destroyer - at closest approach the ships allegedly being within 6 meters of each other! Secondary armament served an useful purpose for those situations where something unexpected happened and you had to fight at close range. They were also valuable because of their relatively high rate of fire - it's really hard to hit nimble targets (such as destroyers and MTBs) with big slow guns. Also, a high rate of fire can let you get shots off that might otherwise be blocked by your own superstructure (or some other obstacle, like a friendly ship or an island). Also, lighter guns can generally turn faster, which can sometimes be important in acquiring a target. I experienced my first storm at sea in the Mediterranean. It doesn't have the same kind of ridiculously bad weather you can get in the North Sea or the Arctic, but it can still have some seasonal storms that can be very nasty. That's why there are so many sunken ancient ships for archeologists to find! It can also have weather conditions like morning fog or rail squalls that limit visibility, and there are lots of islands. So it certainly made sense for the AH to build secondary weapons on their ships. Never forget the importance of understanding the ocean and it's widely varying moods to naval design. The battleship haters, in their claims that carriers made the battleship hopelessly obsolete in WW2, often choose to forget that the ocean is not a flat featureless mathematical space. There were many times during WW2 where carrier air could not fly - but surface warships (including battleships) could still play an important role, whether in deterring attack, providing distant escort, protecting against unexpected encounters with raiding warships, or directly in battle. Take a look at some of the pictures of the Arctic Convoys from WW2 to get an idea of how bad the conditions could be - you'll see crew members out on deck on the warships, chipping ice off the guns! Then think about how often modern aircraft get grounded during bad weather ... and consider that modern aircraft are far better at handling bad weather then what they had available in WW2.

Torpedo boats

The reduce the smoke thickness i believe.

Trieste (now in Italy) was the fourth largest city in the AH Empire. It was (and is) a major port. According to the 1911 Encyclopedia Brittanica: "The bulk of the over-sea trade of Trieste is done with the Levant, Egypt, India and the Far East, Italy, Great Britain and North and South America ... Trieste being the entrepot for Germany's commerce with India and the Mediterranean countries. The principal articles imported are cotton and cotton goods, coffee, coal, cereals, hides, fruit and tobacco; the principal articles exported are wool and woollen goods, sugar, paper, timber, machinery and various manufactured goods." There were several other large ports, with Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) probably being the next most important. It had the first industrial scale oil refinery in Europe in 1882, which gives you an idea of how important and industrialized it was - another major import/export site. Cattaro (now Kotor, Montenegro) and Pola (now Pula, Croatia) were also important ports. So, yes, there were major imports/exports by sea - and one of the primary reasons for having a navy is to protect sea trade. Given that the Adriatic Coast of the AH Empire ran over 1k miles, coastal defenses were not really practical except near the ports. Far more cost effective to protect the coast with ships which could also protect the merchant traffic. Of course, while a navy made sense, there may very well have been major aspects of naval construction that were vanity projects, I can't speak to that offhand. Certainly there were many aspects of the AH Empire that are a good fit to your phrase "another old empire limping along" ...

@@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.

@@iainmc9859 Good points. I imagine they were planning for post-war, not realizing that they were going to lose the war and further that the empire was going to be split up. The Americans only declared war in April 1917 and would not become a major factor for some time (if ever) due to the need to raise and transport and train an army, while Russia was a disaster at that point and would collapse over the course of 1917 so I can see some ground for optimism. I don't think anybody on the other side anticipated just how many people America would be able to mobilize and train and send over to Europe and keep supplied (with massive help from Britain and France), since nothing on that scale had ever been done before in world history. It completely dwarfs what was done in the Crimean War, which was probably the benchmark they used. I don't think the AH actually spent a lot on the designs - since these were only designs not construction - so there wouldn't have been much money to re-purpose for coastal defense. Given the construction time for battleships, and that massive work on infrastructure would have to come first before they could even start building the new ships (as Drach mentions), the ships would not have been available until well into the 1920s, at which point I imagine they were expecting the war to be over and trade to be back to normal.

@@bluelemming5296 Yeah, I sort of missed that point ... they were battleships on paper only 😐

Trieste (now part of Italy) and Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) were the major production centers. Cattaro (now Kotor, Montenegro) and Pola (now Pula, Croatia) were also important naval ports.

German late-war fast battleship 1918 also feature 15cm DP guns.

The 149 DP turrets Im not sure about, but 42cm shore defensr and siege mortars were manifactured by Škoda works already. In an AA mounting the navy had 8.8cm and 10cm guns, and the army adapted the 76.5mm field gun.

some say it was started in 2014 by Putin, and it's slowly ramping up with the assistance of his unwilling backers.