Maximum battleship

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"Maximum Battleship" Design no.1

The "Maximum Battleships", also known as the "Tillman Battleships", were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 upon the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman^[1] by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) of the United States Navy.^[2] The Navy was not interested in the designs and drew them up to win support from the Committee on Naval Affairs, on which Tillman sat. Nevertheless, they helped influence design work on the Pennsylvania and first South Dakota classes of battleships. The plans prepared for the senator were preserved by C&R in the first of its "Spring Styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925.

Senator Tillman had grown impatient with the Navy's requests for larger battleships every year as well as the Navy's habit of building battleships significantly larger than Congress authorized.^{[citation needed]} He accordingly instructed the Navy to design "maximum battleships", the largest battleships that they could use.

"Maximum Battleship" Design no.2

The only limits on the potential size of an American battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the Panama Canal. The locks measure roughly 1,000 by 110 feet (305 m × 34 m), and so the "maximum battleships" were 975 by 108 feet (297 m × 33 m). The Panamax draft limit during the designing of these battleships was 39 feet 6 inches (12.04 m), however the Department of the Navy required that all designs be limited to only 34 feet (10 m) in draft.^[2]

Designs[]

"Maximum Battleship" Design no.3

Tillman's first request for designs of so-called "maximum battleship" in 1912–1913 was never completed. Though the studies resulting from that initial request had some influence on the design of the Pennsylvania class of battleships, that class was essentially just an enlargement of the preceding Nevada class.^{[citation needed]} In 1916, he repeated his request, and this time the Bureau of Construction and Repair produced a series of design studies, which again had some influence^{[citation needed]} on the design of the next class of battleships: in this case the South Dakotas, an enlargement of the previous Colorado class.

4 design blueprints were then drawn up by the Bureau of Construction and Repair, with all four ships having varying characteristics despite being built on the same hull:

"Maximum Battleship" Design no,4

After the first four design studies were complete, Design IV was chosen for further development and three additional studies. Based upon Design IV, three additional designs were prepared: IV-1, IV-2, and IV-3. At the request of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels^{[citation needed]}, these designs used 18-inch (460 mm) guns instead of the 16-inch (410 mm) 50-caliber guns used in the earlier studies. The navy decided that design IV-2 was the most practical (or perhaps the least impractical) and presented it to Congress early in 1917.

Comparisons to other US Navy Battleships[]

These designs differed from the battleships being built in two significant ways beyond just their size. Firstly, unlike preceding classes, the "maximum battleships" were designed with a continuous flush main deck. Most battleships in this era had a long forecastle deck. Secondly, the Tillman designs all included five casemate guns mounted aft, two on each side and one at the tip of the stern. Similar "stern chasers" had been previously mounted in Nevada, but were omitted from the Pennsylvania class. These casemates were a return to an older design idea; American battleship designers had abandoned hull-mounted casemates after the New Mexico class. They had transpired to be too "wet" – heavy seas rendered them unusable—and they had been removed from all earlier classes. However, the casemates on the "maximum battleships" would have been higher above the waterline than they had been on earlier designs, so it is possible that their huge size and flush decks would have provided enough freeboard astern to keep the casemates dry.^{[citation needed]}

"Maximum Battleship" Design IV-1

"Maximum Battleship" Design IV-2

Fate of the Designed Battleships[]

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited naval armaments, causing the cancellation of the South Dakotas and halting all consideration of the "maximum battleships."

See also[]

• HMS Incomparable
• Gavrilo battleship - Russian project (1914 year, 265/34,4/9,15 m, 16x406/45, 24x152/55, 30 knots)

External links[]

• An extensive article about the Tillman battleships, including a look at possible designs for "Tillman battlecruisers.". Retrieved 5 May 2012
• Tillman battleships entry at Global Security
• Design for 80,000-ton battleship prepared by C&R for Senator Tillman, dated 29 December 1916, from U.S. Naval Historical Center. Retrieved 5 May 2012.
• "Construction of battleships", includes the 1912 resolution
• The Shipscribe article on the Bureau of Ships' "Spring Styles" Book # 1 (1911-1925). This specific webpage publicly preserves, among other things, the "maximum battleship" designs as digital photographs from the first "Spring Styles" US Navy catalog, and describes how they were presented therein. Quoting Shipscribe's About page: "The "Spring Styles" drawings were added on 26 April 2015... following the deletion of the Online Library of Selected Images from the web site of the Naval History and Heritage Command."