Author Topic: Courageous Class Battle Cruiser Ideas and Inspirations  (Read 3130 times)

Offline Volkodav

  • Counts rivits with his abacus...
  • Much older now...but procrastinating about it
Courageous Class Battle Cruiser Ideas and Inspirations
« on: September 05, 2014, 01:02:08 PM »
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/85/HMS_Glorious_%281917%29_profile_drawing.png/799px-HMS_Glorious_%281917%29_profile_drawing.png

Always loved these ships as flawed and insane as they were and I was just toying with a bit of a wiff, what if the Washington Treaty did not permit treaty nations to convert existing and under construction tonnage into aircraft carriers?  That is the US and Japan scrap the under-construction vessels they would otherwise have converted while the RN was forced to retain Courageous and Glorious as battlecruisers?  Not sure on Furious as her conversion started pre-treaty and don't know where Eagle would fit in either but basically any ship not already converted to a carrier could not be converted to one with all new carriers having to be designed as such from the start.  Furious may in-fact have had to be scraped or reconverted to a BC but with 16" or smaller guns instead of the 18" singles.

Imagining the retention of the Courageous class as BCs would have meant the Nelsons would never have been built and that the BCs would have ended up as specialist pocket battleship killers and later carrier escorts.  They may have been seen as so useless that the RN may have transferred them to Australia and added to their cruiser fleet instead.  A very heavy DP AA armament or twelve twin 4.5" BD mounts.

A thought just came to me, conversion to carriers is not permitted but the design is so clearly outclassed by the new standard 16" gun type BBs that the RN is permitted to transfer them to the RAN and replace them in service with the Nelsons anyway.  Japan does not object as they see the type as inferior to anything already in the fleet and use this as a negotiating chip to retain all four Kongos and the USN gets to retain Washington.
« Last Edit: September 05, 2014, 01:18:42 PM by Volkodav »