Q&A · 1:49:58-1:51:05

Designing an 80,000-ton battleship for shallow water

Holding an 80,000-ton battleship to a nine-meter draft would create an extremely broad hull and could favor wing turrets to avoid stacking excessive weight high in the ship.

Question

What would an 80,000-ton German battleship constrained to a nine-meter draft look like?

Short answer

Very broad and shallow, probably with many twin 15-inch mounts and possibly wing turrets to keep the battery from becoming too top-heavy.

Notes

The hypothetical yard can build a huge ship, while the waterway still limits draft to nine meters. The resulting design would be a very broad, shallow-draft hull carrying the largest 15-inch battery the available twin mounts permit. To avoid excessive vertical concentration, it might combine superfiring centerline turrets with wing turrets. An illustrative arrangement reaches eight twin mounts but only twelve guns on a broadside, showing how hull form and firing arcs complicate a simple gun-count calculation.