Suddenly that 21 knot battleship speed looks like a massive operational and strategic liability if they want to not have their carriers run in fright at sight of a battleship (This is still the time of the Lexington class carrying a heavy 8' armament to fight off cruisers, air power just couldn't be expected to head off heavy surface attack and conceding the sea wasn't necessarily a winner). So the treaty carrier force was decided on being hulls as big as they could make them and 30+ knots.

Not only could they get places really quick to do important carrier things, they could also operate planes in larger numbers much more easily and in much worse weather. So the US built the Lexingtons, which promptly showed the supremacy of the big fast carrier. So the UK got to build the Nelsons so they could have nice modern battleships armed with and against 16' guns, and the US and Japan could get some carriers. The British had the Courageous, Glorious, and Furious, which were in severe danger of starting to make sense. The US had just finished the Colorado, Maryland and West Virginia, and the Japanese had just finished the Nagato and Mutsu. Unlike in RtW there was a lot of quid pro quo. The reason for this was the negotiations for the treaty. The first US carrier, the Langley, was a slow collier conversion, but the next two were conversions of the battlecruisers Lexington and Saratoga, (which were a lot like the mad, flammable fever dreams of Jackie Fisher in terms of protection, so it was probably a good thing in the end). Problem was those damnable carrier things. They'd traditionally prioritized protection at the expense of speed and slightly less so firepower, giving them a battle line of slow football shaped things that could take a pounding and dish one out. The first and most important thing about this design process is that they were in the middle of figuring out what a modern navy was and how it should work. So the US found itself in the mid 1930s with a need for a new battleship with a treaty in place limiting it to 35k tons displacement and 14 inch guns.

The weird and wonderful world of North Carolina sketches (I moved this up to the front because it's good and I'm angling for a general thing here). So I got goaded into writing posts about the North Carolina class.įor additional reading about warship design:

World of warship north carolina setup