Patreon 73: Queen Elizabeth class battleships - Brave first step, faltering leap or something else?

The opening frames the Queen Elizabeth class as a powerful but constrained fast-battleship step shaped by squadron numbers, speed, boilers, and prewar timing.

A broad comparison puts Queen Elizabeth into several dreadnought races at once, including contests beyond the familiar Anglo-German rivalry.

The design baseline compares Queen Elizabeth dimensions, armor, horsepower, speed, and gun power against the Iron Duke class.

Not by itself. The class began a design progression whose later ships helped define the treaty-era benchmark.

No. Tiger belongs to the Iron Duke design lineage, visible in the ships' lines and shaping.

A comparison with the Nevada class shows two different answers to the dreadnought problem: American armor endurance against British speed and range control.

No. Reaching the desired speed required an oil-fired, small-tube-boiler layout designed into the ship from the beginning, not a machinery swap after construction.

The immediate American, German, and British follow-ons reveal how Queen Elizabeth occupied several naval races at once and why the Revenge class advertised Britain's quantitative victory.

A force-structure counterfactual shows how completing the Revenge class before the war might have released first-generation dreadnoughts to Dominion fleets.

A force-employment digression explains why replacing battleships with more battlecruisers would weaken convoy defense and combat in confined waters.

It would likely sacrifice one twin turret for substantially more machinery, producing a six-gun ship above 30 knots and broadly resembling the Renown class.

No. A fifth turret would have required a materially different hull and superstructure arrangement.

Only unreliably. A raider could jam the convoy's transmissions, leaving the distant battlecruiser without a timely location to intercept.

The institutional section explains who shaped the design and why Churchill's oil-fuel push mattered inside the Admiralty.

The United States had little doctrinal reason to match the speed, while Germany would have faced an unaffordable engineering and funding burden.

A strategic explanation shows how the Queen Elizabeth class could pressure German naval funding without wrecking Britain's quieter rivalry with the United States.

The armament discussion treats 15-inch twin turrets as a powerful but controlled leap that avoided a larger American response.

British infrastructure could already accommodate a Hood-sized ship, and the industrial setting may even have been more favorable than in 1919.

The boiler section marks the strongest missed opportunity: small-tube oil-fired boilers could have improved speed without provoking the same gun-caliber race.

Keep it in Jellicoe's Grand Fleet as a battleship fast wing; Beatty received the historical squadron only because his own battlecruisers temporarily left for training.

Possibly. It might also have delayed the promotion path that made him Grand Fleet commander, so the institutional gain carried an operational cost.

The Queen Elizabeth Maximus counterfactual shows why the technically possible 15-gun, 16.5-inch fast battleship would have been strategically destabilizing.

They would likely establish the fast battleship as the normal successor to the dreadnought much earlier, making 21-knot capital ships less attractive.

Possibly, but not predictably. An American 18-inch answer and a British construction pause might create a temporary balance, yet changing the scale of the competition could also change its political rules.

No. The canal would need an earlier widening program, while oversized ships would otherwise have to move between oceans around Cape Horn.

Not necessarily. The Revenges were more efficient new designs, while Queen Elizabeth's original inefficiencies happened to provide room for later major reconstruction.

Roughly three to four years, because American 14-inch guns were already in service and 16-inch work had begun.

It was cheaper by battleship standards, but the saving did not make it a cheap warship.

Not easily in the 1910s. Manufacturing a much longer barrel was a harder metallurgical problem than increasing caliber with the methods then available.

About 1,200, estimated from the roughly 950-person Queen Elizabeth complement and the 1,000-to-1,100-person Iron Duke complement.

Yes. Britain might plateau on a design already far ahead of its rivals and keep building repeats instead of demanding an immediate successor.

The Maximus counterfactual exposes a prewar capability gap: Britain could build escorts, but effective submarine detection and attack systems were not yet mature.

The model follows the Royal Navy's established five-turret A-B-Q-X-Y arrangement, with the mast and superstructure placed around the central mounting.

The proposed sixth Queen Elizabeth becomes a source-critical investigation into whether Britain intended a one-off, small-tube-boiler battleship with six 18-inch guns.

They were distributed across five yards. Only Queen Elizabeth and the proposed Agincourt formed a sequential pair at Portsmouth.

A brief news digression explains why identifying a submarine wreck establishes its location but does not by itself establish how it was lost.

It was theoretically possible, but Britain was unlikely to accept the resulting hull stresses and pitching problems.

That belief was one factor discussed: Japanese planners credited Queen Elizabeth with roughly 25 knots and sought an advantage over it.

Only modest adjustment in this reconstruction, chiefly moving the two forward turrets, superstructure, and after turret closer to the ship's center.

No. The Director of Naval Construction's performance estimate was accurate to about a quarter knot despite the redesign.

Yes. Their enormous heat and power demands encouraged vertically integrated works that generated their own power and handled much of their own supporting infrastructure.

No. Moore was technically capable but pragmatically unwilling to stake the program on a still-unproven system.

Its clearer benefit was sustaining full power. Larger gains required small-tube or later high-pressure boilers designed to exploit the hotter fuel.

It would continue the Anglo-American qualitative race, not revive the defeated Anglo-German quantitative contest.