BATTLECRUISERS. GOOD? BAD? WHY? [DEBATE/POLL]

[The CFR of Kaltovar]

Battlecruisers are fast and powerful ships that have played a significant role in naval warfare. They are highly maneuverable and can inflict significant damage to the enemy, even to well armored Battleships. However, they are not as well protected, making them vulnerable to enemy fire. They are also expensive to build and maintain.

Today we will be debating the pros and cons of Battlecruisers. Are they good or bad? Did they deserve a larger place in industrial era naval warfare, or no place at all?


Or if you'd prefer, you may just drop a vote and duck out to avoid the crossfire!

[The CFR of Kaltovar]

My perspective: At extreme ranges hits were rare in the first place, so it was better to carry more numerous and larger guns than the enemy and control the range of the engagement. If you can pelt them at greater range than they can hit you, and you're faster, you can simply deter them with impunity. If their smaller vessels move to catch up with you, you've got the firepower and armor to kill them up close before they're within torpedo range.

Although it's true they're vulnerable if put into the wrong position, they can still be supremely effective when carefully managed by cautious Captains. Namely, bad situations would be under an equal number of enemy guns or more that can also equal their own firing range or in narrow places where their maneuverability is hampered. However, a Battlecruiser should be able to escape any such situation unless faced by other Battlecruisers, due to being faster than its enemies.

In my view if every Allied Navy had opted to replace their Battleships with very large Battlecruisers of similar displacement, you'd see better effect against the Japanese Navy in the Pacific where the theater of operations was so large that the increased speed and fuel efficiency would really come into play.

[Pantso]

Historically the large, powerful, "super weapons" touted by military enthusiasts have proven unworkable in the long term and outmatched by smaller, lighter, more maneuverable weapons. The battleship became obsolete when it could be wrecked by faster craft at sea and in the air. The Spanish Galleon, massive wooden sailing ships with three banks of cannon, were vulnerable first to storms and then to the much smaller English frigates that could circle around a galleon and rake them. The Nazis military loved superweapons and while some ended up working - like cruise missiles and jet fighters - others were ludicrously improbable like the Landkreuzer, a tank-like mobile fighting platform weighing 1000 tons, or were simply too impractical to use effectively, like the rail artillery that was barely used.

A maneuverable and adaptable fighting force equipped with enough fire power to punch through heavy armor gives a tactician lots of options; one or two massive superweapons limits your forces to just a few options. The military with greater options will always have a massive advantage over those who must resort to the same few over and over.

[The CFR of Kaltovar]

I can see your points, Pantso, and they're largely valid, but I do think you neglect the Dreadnought effect!

There is a certain point where a ship becomes so much faster and more heavily armed than anything the enemy has that it becomes almost impossible to defeat in open terrain. Large ships can move as fast as small ships given enough machinery space, and while not as maneuverable, maneuver is a minimal requirement for extreme range engagement.

You can certainly armor a BC well enough to resist the guns of cruisers and destroyers, and carry enough secondary weapons of sufficient caliber to eliminate them. If chasing you, they're forced to move head on which makes a portion of their guns useless, while you can turn broadside toward them and hit them with everything you have as their Battleships are out of range.

For reasons you underlined it's not sensible to make an entire navy of Battlecruisers. Instead replacing Battleships with them is what I recommend.

The BC exists to strip the enemy of those diverse assets: Their raiding vessels, their cruisers, their destroyers. It's fast enough to just about catch them or even overtake them in some cases, meaning it can ambush them outside narrow passages like Gibraltar, south of the Red Sea, or the Straight of Singapore or Luzon. You would keep a larger navy of diverse craft on standby to support the BCs if needed, retreating back into them if chased by numerically superior faster enemies who are too many to destroy before they reach you. This way you can besiege the enemy Navy from a distance with the heavy guns of your BCs and weaken them as much as possible before decisively engaging them. If they refuse to decisively engage you, that's even better, because you can just use the BCs to freely raid their shipping and naval bases as well as hunt their convoys.

When Dreadnought came out it broke the traditional rules of naval war, where a balanced and diverse fleet reigned supreme, by being so much better than anything available at the time as to be almost unassailable by older vessels. It achieved that with armor. I propose BCs could have achieved the same thing with speed and cannon range. Not for the sake of avoiding enemy fire with their speed, but for controlling what range the engagement takes place at and shifting more quickly into and out of the warfleet to engage targets or retreat back for cover or to conduct joint operations!

[Jabberwocky]

If I were to go to war, battlecruisers would be a must, even if they're space cruisers.

[The CFR of Kaltovar]

I love space battle cruisers 0w0

Especially sentient space battlecruisers