What were the design philosophies of Kreigsmarine battleships?
I'm looking for some good resource for learning more about Kreigsmarine design philosophies, but it's hard to know which books are the most reliable.
>What were the design philosophies of Kreigsmarine battleships?
Pray to God that the RN does not sink your ship.
I dont know much about their ships, other than they look the best, and that their strategy was "Fleet in being" even that Im not sure about
>Take a cruiser
>make it larger
>call it a battleship
>>309436
You want Power at Sea, Volume 2 by Lisle Rose, it goes into a lot of the design philosophy.
As for BB design, well, the Kriegsmarine only made 4, the Scharnhorst, Gnisenau, Bismarck, and Tirpitz. They were all designed to be fast, to outrun RN battleships. Scharnhorst and Gnisenau were designed under treaty limits, and were undergunned for battleships.
Honestly though, they weren't that effective. I realize I'm wanking my own country, but American battleships were vastly superior to anything else built in the war.
>>309489
And I got the picture of the wrong book in the series. I am an idiot, sorry.
>>309489
It's interesting to hear that they were designed to outrun the RNs ships. I've always heard that Bismarck was supposed to be unsinkable and that it was designed to outfight the RN's ships.
Is that misinformation?
>>309500
>It's interesting to hear that they were designed to outrun the RNs ships
Yeah, they were hellish fast. The Bismarck could pull 30 knots, and the Scharnhorsts could do 31.
>I've always heard that Bismarck was supposed to be unsinkable and that it was designed to outfight the RN's ships.
It was designed to be able to outrun RN battleships and outfight its cruisers, but outfight another BB?
The Bismarck had 8 15 inch guns and a 12.6 inch armor belt. The Queen Elizabeth class, which came out in 1914, also had 8 15 inch guns and a 13 inch belt.
Everyone remembers the Hood, but that was almost certainly some kind of fluke, a magazine hit most likely; on paper, it was a dead even gunfight.
If the Bismarck ran into a RN battleship, its best recourse was to run.
>>309436
>Anglos have the big meme ships
>we need bigger meme ships
wilhelm 2 was a megakek of the highest order and bismarck should have had poison slipped in his soup when he was a child.
>>309536
Kriegsmarine is WW2 you doofus.
>>309536
How is that relevant?
>>309527
So why were the Brits so terrified of the Bismarck? The number of ships they diverted from original duty and sent after the Bismarck was quite high. They even left troop transports unguarded for it.
>>309554
Because the main threat the RN in 1941 was geared to fight was u-boats. You had a huge number of merchant vessels under the guard of small ships, corvettes and destroyer escorts for the most part. Submarines don't have much firepower, and so lots of little boats can fend them off.
Enter the Bismarck. It's fast enough to run down a convoy, and can slaughter every last one of those little boats without trouble. It's fast enough to outrun every ship you have that's got big enough guns and thick enough armor to fight it, which means unless you get lucky (or play the airplane trump) you can only fight on its terms, not yours. If it gets out into the North Sea and you lose track of it, it'll keep raiding convoys, and chewing them up. The British had a "huge" fleet, but they only had 11 or 12 battleships, IIRC, and if you want to be sure of winning, you'll probably want to double or triple team the thing. Chances are, it'll eat a number of convoys before you can catch it, even if you can catch it.
>>309465
>"Fleet in being"
It's essentially placing a fleet in a harbor and letting it sit there and threaten the enemy, similar to the US battle fleet in Pearl Harbor. The ships don't actually do anything, but by having battleships the enemy would attempt to sail around them in case the battleship actually comes out of harbor.
>>310032
Not the guy you're responding to, but that's not really how a fleet in being works.
It doesn't force the enemy to try to sail around them, it forces them to bunch up fleet assets. Mahan was wrong about a lot of things, but one thing he was right about was if you can decisively defeat your enemy's fleet, you can split up your own naval assets, start crushing lightly armed merchant and shipping vessels.
But now you've got a fleet in being at Pearl Harbor. 5 cruisers, 8 battleships, 2 carriers. You don't know where or when they'll sortie out in force. At worst, the whole lot might come out together. If you split up, you run the risk of the fleet in being crushing your ships a few at a time.
What it does is force the other power to keep his own fleet together or risk losing a battle in detail, which can restrict some of his depredations agianst you, especially if you're the weaker party.
As a final note, Pearl's fleet wasn't intended for a fleet in being strategy, Plan Orange was for it to go on the offensive once war was declared. Would have gotten them slaughtered, but that was the plan.
>>309527
Hood wasn't a fluke so much as a reminder of what happens when a Battlecruiser encounters a Battleship.
>>309554
A surface ship capable of outrunning anything it can't kill and killing anything that can catch it is a huge problem. Just look at what happened with the Graf Spee, which was little more than a glorified battlecruiser.
>>309436
The Kriegsmarine knows that they can't last long against the RN in a standup fight because of a lack of resources and funding (most of it going to the Heer and the Luftwaffe) and because of treaties that limited German navy capacity. Instead, they made ships designed for raiding. Naval guerrilla warfare if you will. The same conditions gave rise to the "pocket battleship" cruiser-killers and u-boat wolfpacks.
>>310073
A better example of Fleet in Being would be the Tirpitz. Even though it pretty much sat in port the entire war, the Royal Navy had to devote an absurd amount of resources to keeping it in check.
>>310082
The Hood might have been Admiral class, and designed as a battlecruiser, but I don't think you can really call it one: It had armament and weaponry equivalent to a lot of the battleships out there; on paper, it matched the Bismarck gun for gun and in armor weight. Does that make the Bismarck a battlecruiser?
>>310088
And look at what happened to poor PQ 17 just on the rumor that it was about. The Germans never really did enough with that, the convoy system made ships more vulnerable to surface attack, and they should have done something to play on that.
>>310100
Naval designations are weird and arbitrary. Don't worry too hard about names.
