Empire Conquest

Chapter 611 - 607: The Outcome of Choices

After the outbreak of the great war, the Imperial Navy overhauled its Battleship construction work, and the first to be abandoned was the Large Cruiser.

It wasn’t that the Large Cruiser couldn’t meet the Navy’s tactical requirements, but rather that the performance of the Fast Battleship was simply too eye-catching.

The naval battle at Watch Strait alone was enough to solidify the Imperial Navy’s stance on Fast Battleships.

In certain special circumstances, the 400mm Naval guns on a Battleship still had a place, capable of playing a decisive role and impossible to replace for the time being.

The main guns of the Large Cruiser?

If on the west side of the Watcher Strait there had been 2 Large Cruisers equipped with 300mm main guns, instead of two fierce "Xu Sea" class Fast Battleships, not to mention sinking two "Damen" class, they probably would have been flattened by the Permanent Fleet’s Main Force Squad.

Against this backdrop, the Imperial Navy launched the construction plan for the "Nanzhu Sea" class, to be precise, an adjustment was made.

Following pre-war planning, after the construction of the two "Xu Sea" class was complete, two "Muddy Sea" class would be built with only minor improvements and adjustments. The real intention of the Navy was to use this small-batch construction approach to understand the performance characteristics and actual tactical use of the Fast Battleships, ensuring that work could immediately begin on constructing more powerful post-Treaty Type Fast Battleships after the outbreak of the great war.

However, the war broke out a year ahead of schedule, and all the Navy’s pre-war deployments came to naught.

Additionally, the "Xu Sea" class proved through combat that their performance was already powerful enough, and many of the tactics envisioned before the war indeed had high value.

Most representative of these was the ability to search for targets using radar at night and provide fire control parameters for the Naval guns.

More crucially, in the initial phase of the great war, what the Imperial Navy needed most were carriers, not Fast Battleships!

Combat also proved that the loss rates of Fast Battleships were far lower than those of carriers, and their readiness rates were far above carriers.

This led to a situation where there was no need to build Fast Battleships on a one-for-one basis.

Exactly for this reason, the Imperial Navy urgently made adjustments, cancelling the construction projects for two "Muddy Sea" class vessels and merging them into the next generation Fast Battleships, the "Nanzhu Sea" class, and furthermore, increased the initial planned number for construction from two to four.

It was only while making this adjustment that the Imperial Navy apparently failed to realize it would have two key impacts.

Firstly, building four Fast Battleships simultaneously would take up more dock space. It was clearly not possible for the Imperial Navy to use valuable dock time to build Fast Battleships at the beginning of the war, which would inevitably delay the start times and give priority to carrier construction.

Secondly, in the initial phase of the great war, due to the intense nature of the hostilities, the readiness rates of the Fast Battleships were not that high—especially as there was a need to assign Fast Battleships to tasks beyond escort duties—so a type of Large Battleship specifically designed to protect carriers was required.

Naturally, this led to the revival of the Large Cruiser project.

In fact, this was related to the factors mentioned earlier.

In real combat, the loss rates of the Large Battle Ships protecting carriers, as well as their readiness rates, were all above carriers, which meant that the number of escort Battle Ships could be appropriately reduced.

The key lay in what was "appropriate."

No one knew how many escort Battleships would be sunk or damaged in the next naval battle, so it was impossible to determine the number of escort Battleships to be built in advance.

Thus, the only option was to find a cost-effective solution.

Simply put, that meant building some low-cost escort Battleships to ensure that there would be replacements available when Fast Battleships were either not available or insufficient.

And so, the Large Cruiser project was restarted.

Even up to that point, there were still voices of opposition within the Imperial Navy.

The key issue is that the "Large Cruiser" before the war was not the same as the "Large Cruiser" after the war; they were fundamentally different warships.

After making adjustments, the Large Cruiser was no longer a "cruiser killer," but had become a "carrier escort."

Simply put, unless it was related to covering carriers, any other performance could be reduced or even discarded.

In the initial design version, the Imperial Navy had equipped the Large Cruiser with 200mm Naval guns that met the standard configuration of a Heavy Cruiser, with three triple-turret Main Guns. As a result, aside from the better shooting stability in high-sea conditions due to the larger displacement, the Main Gun firepower was not superior to that of a Heavy Cruiser. In fact, because of the larger hull and increased surface area, it was at a disadvantage in combat.

It was for this reason that, during the design phase, the Large Cruiser still met with opposition from many Navy Generals.

However, everyone had to face reality.

The harshest reality was that the Empire indeed did not have enough large shipyards to guarantee the construction of carriers and also build enough Fast Battleships.

The construction of the "Nanzhu Sea" class was delayed several times due to the lack of shipyards.

According to the plans at the time, at most one-third of the shipyard time could be used to build escort battleships, while the other two-thirds were required for the construction of carriers. If Fast Battleships were still chosen, it was not possible to meet the standard of a one-to-one ratio. Since the Battleship’s construction process was more complex and took longer shipyard time, only using half of the shipyard time meant the number of Battleships built would be roughly only one-third of the number of carriers.

Clearly, this was a very serious problem.

Even if the loss rate of Fast Battleships was much lower than that of carriers, it couldn’t be just one-third of the carriers.

It was for this reason that after the "province" class was launched, the Large Cruiser project officially began, or more accurately, commenced construction.

Interestingly, even at the time of commencement, the decision was still to choose 200mm Main Guns.

In order to quickly commission the Large Cruisers into service, the Navy couldn’t be too fussy. Don’t forget, the previous Long-range Cruisers were still equipped with 150mm Naval guns.

About 3 months after the work began, the Imperial Navy obtained the Tiaoman Empire’s 280mm Naval guns and made a temporary decision to use them on the Large Cruisers.

Fortunately, the option to replace the Main Guns in the future had been considered during the design phase.

Furthermore, the Main Gun turrets ordered for the Large Cruisers were in fact those of the Heavy Cruisers, so they could be directly used on the Heavy Cruisers as well.

As for the ship’s structural design, since they hadn’t yet reached the turret section, there was no issue of major adjustments.

It was for this reason that the class named "Huai River" was actually a relatively simple, primarily anti-aircraft Large Battleship.

In terms of combat capability, the "Huai River" class emphasized anti-aircraft defenses.

Of course, as seen from the naming convention, the Imperial Navy still treated the Large Cruiser as a Main Battle Ship, bestowing it with the name of a battlecruiser.

Because of the substantial reduction in other requirements, including the use of 280mm Main Guns, reducing the output power of the power systems to 150,000 horsepower, simplifying the armor significantly, the cost of the "Huai River" class was only equivalent to 60% of the "Nanzhu Sea" class.

The cost of the second batch was less than 50% of the first batch of the "Nanzhu Sea" class.

According to the shipyard’s report, if another batch was to be built, even with minor improvements to address the exposed issues, the cost could be reduced by another 20%.

Clearly, such a price was very attractive.

In terms of pure anti-aircraft fighting capabilities, the "Huai River" class was not inferior to the "Nanzhu Sea" class, and could even be somewhat stronger.

Of course, the value of the Large Cruiser was not limited to this.