A Ultimate Admiral Dreadnoughts Campaign: Building a Battle Cruiser Navy... part 7

Four battlecruisers and two light cruisers at Singapore give the distant station a ready operational reserve.

With crew training and transport capacity at maximum, the navy orders sixteen coastal minelaying submarines while still accounting for people and support capacity.

A fleet concentrated off France is expected to damage the French economy. Sea control becomes pressure on the enemy's ability to sustain war.

Light cruisers and destroyers are assigned to screen, scout, and hunt while the capital ships form the battle line behind them.

Grouping a fast battlecruiser with ships limited to 24 knots sacrifices its speed advantage so the formation can stay together.

Concentrated six-inch fire from several directions can punish a lighter French battlecruiser at close range.

A battlecruiser's slight advantages in speed and range leave it exposed to a battleship's much heavier armor.

A cruiser operating away from battleship support needs torpedoes for protection and to create a close-range threat.

With six-inch ammunition exhausted and another enemy ship approaching, the safer choice is to accept defeat instead of risking a thinner battlecruiser to finish a damaged opponent.

Maximum reinforced bulkheads help contain flooding and fire, but their weight reduces the margin available for fuel and other design choices.

The campaign shifts fleets toward northern France as an invasion plan absorbs available ships, bases, crews, and older hulls.

New ships enter service while vessels built between 1911 and 1918 are scrapped so scarce trained crews can move into the modern fleet.

Reviewing fast, heavily armed capital-ship designs leads to the idea of a ship whose six-inch battery can handle destroyers and light cruisers without close escort support.

A super-battleship design is reduced from an extravagant starting point by trading speed, hull protection, armament layout, and weight balance.

The super-battleship balances 10,900 kilometres of endurance against weight, while an oversized barbette preserves room for a later turret upgrade.

The completed Hood-class design combines nine 16.5-inch guns with an eighteen-gun six-inch broadside, whose firing arcs determine coverage at each end of the ship.

A convoy escort that charges out after an attacker can leave the merchant ships exposed, giving a fast surface raider a route through the screen.

The game's six-inch turrets look narrower than its four-inch mounts, although larger real-world guns require larger mountings.

The campaign's light cruisers carry an enormous torpedo supply. Their design and tactics revolve around repeated mass attacks.

Admiral Togo faced pressure before Tsushima because the Russian fleet had not yet come out to be defeated.

A light-cruiser force closes on a heavier cruiser to launch torpedoes before its seven-inch guns can exploit the lighter ships' thin armor.

A seemingly undefended merchant convoy reveals torpedo capability, prompting a comparison with armed merchant cruisers.

Sonar warning and 36-knot speed do not save a cruiser that turns across the torpedo tracks, while a later passage sets out the choices of turning away or toward the weapon.

Even 1.5 million tons against an 845,000-ton requirement produces only a 29 percent invasion chance, despite an overwhelming British concentration against the nearby French surface force.