The Ship Model Forum

I guess there must have been an L20a design, but it does not seem to have received any but the most preliminary consideration. Focus went quickly to L20b. I am not aware of any single design called L20α. There was an entire series of L20 studies, along with a related L24 family. L21-23 may have been simply L20b variants with 38cm guns--I don't know. In any case, none of these things got past the "Entw�rfe" stage, as far as I can tell. As previously noted, no "ersatz" name was assigned, so nothing can be considered to have been finalized, though L20eα may have been identified as the basis for construction in September 1918. As if it mattered at that point.
Whether or not a design was theoretically practicable is a different issue. I believe the L20 family was considered for the real world, though there were plenty of "L" and "GK" drafts that were clearly meant as studies for their own sake.

[quote="Werner"]

The L20a class battleships were not possible. (43,800 tons, 8x16.5", 26Knots).
[/quote]

These ships are reasonably close in all properties to the very nearly contemporary Japanese Nagato and Kaga classes. I do not believe the Germans would encounter any major technical difficulties in building them.

- Chuck

[quote="Roger T"][quote="Laurence Batchelor"]The follow on BCs and BB's you mention to my knowledge their keels were never laid so in my eyes these 'design studies' were merely that not concrete.[/quote]
You're right, no keels were laid, they are purely paper projects.

And even had the Germans won the war, I doubt they would have built any of those ships as drafted. Just as we inspected captured German vessels and conducted trials on them, so the victorious Germans would have done likewise on our vessels. Any postwar vessels would have incorporated those lessons, so who knows what they would have built?[/quote]
Looking at literature published in the 1930s about ship construction, including a fairly detailed inboard diagram of [i]North Carolina[/i], including her torpedo defense ([i]Popular Science[/i], along with [i]Saratoga[/i]), I believe the Kriegsmarine was fully informed both officially and unofficially regarding the details of foreign ship construction, yet [i]Bismarck[/i] and [i]Scharnhorst[/i] are barely updated WW.I designs.

I think the practical lesson of WW.I German operations is their ships were perfectly satisfactory in design, but needed more auxiliaries like leak pumps.

[quote="Laurence Batchelor"]The follow on BCs and BB's you mention to my knowledge their keels were never laid so in my eyes these 'design studies' were merely that not concrete.[/quote]
You're right, no keels were laid, they are purely paper projects.

And even had the Germans won the war, I doubt they would have built any of those ships as drafted. Just as we inspected captured German vessels and conducted trials on them, so the victorious Germans would have done likewise on our vessels. Any postwar vessels would have incorporated those lessons, so who knows what they would have built?

Construction continued up to a point.... There were several hulls well along after the armistice. There were even plans in the post-war era for their use as merchant hulls.

Like WW.II, the designers continued to churn out plans, even when all hope of construction vanished.

[quote="chuck"]...but for the defeat in 1918?[/quote]

I was under the impression all German WWI capital ship construction was stopped by 1916, not because of the 1918 defeat.

Did the fact that a lot of the navy mutinied affect the moral of the dockyard workers also and they followed suit?

The follow on BCs and BB's you mention to my knowledge their keels were never laid so in my eyes these 'design studies' were merely that not concrete.

I suppose the design offices had to keep busy from 1916-1918 :big_grin:

Breyer also has drawings of the German 1918, 1919 and 1920 program battleships.

The wonderful Dreadnought Project site has a large number of very high quality (and big!) scans of design drawings of various battlecruiser and fast battleship studies (no L type battleships, though):

[url]http://www.dreadnoughtproject.org/plans/SM_Studienentwurf/[/url]

The plans appear to be the personal property of the site's owner, and he asserts that he is the copyright holder, before anyone asks!

The [i]Ersatz Yorck[/i] (38,000 tons, 8x15", 27.25 knots) were possible. The first of the three was actually laid down.

The L20a class battleships were not possible. (43,800 tons, 8x16.5", 26Knots).

I disagree about the nomenclature. As you know, the German Fleet was to be constructed to a particular statutory strength. This strength was measured in "underage" ships. As such, "ersatz" ships replaced elements of the fleet which were about to be retired or were lost, while alpha "A","B" and so on were place-holders in the expansion programs.

Tirpitz' Marineamt could be expected to be pedantic in this way. The Admiralty would not. The actual names assigned to the ships did not correspond to the "ersatz" value since there may be a few years' overlap between launch of one and decommissioning of the other.

I suspect you can find a good indicator of the prospects for actual construction by looking at projects assigned an "ersatz" name. If a design had only a GK or L designator, it was too far down the road to be considered finalized.

The Germans clearly had finalized plans for 13.75 and 15" armed follow-ons to the Derfflinger class battlecruiser, which were the last class of battlecruiser Imperial Germany actually completed. Evidence for the concrete final plans lies in the hulls actually laid down and launched.

There were also studies for very impressive battleship follow ons to the Baden class, to be armed with 16.5 inch guns, capable of 25 knots, and gives up little to post war ships canceled under Washington treaty. But how final were those plans? Were those blue sky studies or concrete projects to be built but for the defeat in 1918?