On the projects of battleships "for the needs of the Far East" – C. Kramp, A. Lagan, K. K. Ratnik
As is known, the Naval Ministry received American, French and several domestic battleship designs "for the needs of the Far East"... Let's take a closer look at them.
Prototypes
Perhaps the worst prototype was that of C. Crump. The American-built Iowa was certainly a good ship when compared to the American ironclads that preceded it. But the ship, with a speed of 16 knots (during trials, as far as I know, it reached 17,09 knots), 625 tons of normal coal storage, obsolete 12-inch/35 guns, a horizontal armored deck without slopes, etc., didn't look all that good even when compared to the Poltava-class ironclads, whose design was clearly outdated by 1898. Unfortunately, I do not have any data on the design of the 12,400-ton battleship presented by C. Crump, but it is unlikely that the difference in displacement of 1054 tons (the Iowa had a normal displacement of 11,356 tons) could have “pulled” the already outdated design to the level of a modern ocean-going battleship in 1898.
At the same time, the French took as a prototype the battleships of the Charles Martel type, which were, in some way, familiar to our Naval Ministry. History This is what happened to them. A little over a year before the events described, in March 1897, the Director of the Naval Ministry instructed Captain 1st Rank A. M. Abaza, who was based in Le Havre, to gather information about the available Forges et Chantiers shipyards in order to explore the possibility of ordering several 6000-ton cruisers. In response, A. M. Abaza, no longer connected to the task assigned to him, reported that he had had the opportunity to make inquiries and inspect a number of French ships in Toulon, including the battleship Jauréguiberry, a member of the Charles Martel class.
A. M. Abaza described this ship as a 12,000-ton battleship with two armor belts covering the waterline, the lower one reaching up to 45 cm and the upper one up to 10 cm, and an armament including 2×300-mm, 2×270-mm, 8×140-mm, and 6×65-mm guns (the figures presented by A. M. Abaza are not entirely accurate, but are close to the actual figures). The speed "in active service" was 17 knots, and the range was 8000 miles. Moreover, according to A. M. Abaza, the ship was quite undemanding in terms of cost and construction time. The cost of the ship without armament and ammunition was estimated at 23 million francs, which was 8625 thousand rubles. (According to the 1904 Ship List, one franc was worth 0,375 rubles), and the battleship's construction took 30-36 months. Considering that the Peresvet, without armament, was estimated to cost 8,919,000 rubles and took approximately 50 months to build, these figures are quite interesting.
A. M. Abaza, however, was full of praise for the French battleship: he had the opportunity to study the Jauréguiberry from the inside for four hours and found it to be the finest ship he had ever seen. The ship, according to A. M. Abaza, was very well thought out in terms of its overall layout, spacious, and ensured ease of operation. artillery and the supply of shells. Furthermore, A. M. Abaza noted the high quality of the ship's construction, and his overall verdict was as follows: "This ship deserves full attention."Later, A.M. Abaza spoke extremely highly of its builder:
The director of the plant, Mr. Lagan, is probably the most talented shipbuilder in France.
"Zhoregiberri", which made such a strong impression on A. M. Abaza
Some of our esteemed readers may wonder: how can one praise a battleship with a diamond-shaped layout in 1897, especially one with two main guns instead of one? But it's important to understand that designers cannot change a ship's performance characteristics at their own discretion: they design exactly what the client requires. The same applies to builders, who are obligated to build according to the plans provided by the designers.
For a ship to be successful in any respect, its development must be given the correct technical specifications, the designers must create a good design, and then it must be properly executed in metal. But these three pillars are only loosely interconnected: for example, a superbly designed ship can be poorly built. Or consider the armored cruiser Rurik II: it was superbly designed and well built, yet it was "born too late," as it was designed to meet the specifications for a good armored cruiser, when the era of dreadnoughts and battlecruisers had arrived. So, it can be assumed that A. M. Abaza praised the designers and builders, and not necessarily the admirals who formulated the requirements for the Zhoregiberry's armament.
Be that as it may, the MTC had information that the Charles Martel-class battleships, used as the prototype for the Tsarevich, were quite successful, while there were no such reviews about the American Iowa. At the same time, the MTC was completely unimpressed by C. Crump's "12,400-ton battleship" project.
As for Russian designers, they were initially forced to use the Peresvet design as a prototype, but this wasn't their choice. Wanting to build battleships for the Far East as quickly as possible, the Naval Ministry sought to take advantage of the advantages of mass-produced ships. Mass production could be achieved if the new battleships could be designed as closely as possible to the Peresvet and Oslyabya, which were already under construction at the Baltic Shipyard and the Port of St. Petersburg.
This point is extremely important: our designers weren't free to choose the prototype; it was imposed on them "from above," that is, by the Naval Ministry—and there were entirely objective reasons for this. But one should never think that domestic design thinking was "stuck" on the Peresvet and unable to come up with anything else. It's enough to recall the design for a "turret armored cruiser" with a displacement of 15,000 tons, developed by the Baltic Shipyard. Such a ship was proposed for construction immediately after the launch of the armored cruiser Rossiya, and its characteristics were highly unusual, yet impressive. With a normal displacement of 15,000 tons, the cruiser was to carry "battleship" armament: four 12-inch guns in twin turrets and 13 six-inch guns in casemates. The cruiser's speed was expected to be 20 knots, thanks to its "mind-boggling" length of 146,3 meters.
Little is known about this project: on December 16, 1895, the sketch received the approval of the Emperor himself, but how it came to him without going through the ITC is a complete mystery. Detailed technical documentation for the project was submitted to the Technical Committee only on April 22, 1896, but due to the decision to build a new cruiser "based on slightly modified drawings of the cruiser Rossiya", the project did not receive the MTC's verdict.
What a pity! It would be extremely interesting to see how the battle between the Vladivostok detachment and Kamimura's cruisers in the Korea Strait would have gone if the Gromoboy had carried twelve-inch turret guns.
But I digress. I consider the choice of the Peresvet as a prototype a very unfortunate decision. Without a doubt, any design can be improved, but only to a certain point. There is a limit to modernization—a point of technical feasibility beyond which further upgrades become ineffective or even impossible. History is very illustrative in this regard. tank T-34. Certainly, its first prototypes possessed great potential for modernization. And this potential was fully realized in the T-34-85, in which the design reached its apogee, and the tank itself became legendary and, according to many experts, the best tank of World War II.
But this was the limit of modernization: attempts to introduce any further innovations would obviously have resulted in the tank either becoming excessively heavy, losing its inherent mobility, or becoming technically unreliable. Simply put, further radical improvements to any of the T-34-85's characteristics (armament, armor, etc.) were not exactly impossible, but could only be achieved at the expense of critically lowering other performance characteristics, making the "improved" tank overall inferior to the existing one. The appropriate conclusions were drawn, and the venerable veteran was replaced by vehicles from completely new designs: the T-44 and T-54/55, whose level the T-34-85 simply could not match.
So, there's no doubt that the limits of the Peresvet project's modernization were effectively reached somewhere around the Pobeda. All displacement reserves had already been exhausted on Peresvet and Oslyaba as a result of constant design improvements during construction, and not just exhausted, but "overhauled" by approximately a thousand tons. The design of the Pobeda succeeded in reducing overload somewhat while maintaining the 10-inch main caliber, but the ship can hardly be called entirely successful due to its heavy and fuel-hungry three-shaft propulsion plant.
In my opinion, it was precisely reaching the limit of modernization that doomed the attempt to create the "12-inch" Peresvet design: the latter turned out to be larger than the Tsarevich (13,500 tons), but at the same time, in a number of respects, it was inferior to the Peresvet. The situation was rectified only on April 8, 1898, when the Baltic Shipyard received a new program for a twin-shaft battleship of 12,700 tons. It can be said that the futility of the Peresvet design was recognized even at the Naval Ministry, but it clearly continued to weigh heavily on the admirals' minds. True, from that point on, the designers were no longer obligated to adhere to the theoretical drawing of the Peresvet or to retain its other design features, but at the same time, the new technical specifications essentially called for a ship with a twin-shaft propulsion system and 12-inch guns, but in all other respects, it was to remain similar to the Peresvet. The limitation of normal displacement to 12,700 tons (obviously dictated by economy), of which 1000 tons had to be coal, was very strict and left no room for improving the artillery or protecting beyond the requirements established by the battleship program of 12,700 tons.
About the advantages and disadvantages of the presented projects
The simplest case is the American 12,400-ton battleship project. Unfortunately, I have no information about it, but the fact remains: the project was rejected by the Ministry of Transport and Communications even before the Naval Ministry had the opportunity to review the Russian and French proposals. Therefore, it can be safely concluded that C. Crump's project had more shortcomings than advantages and did not meet the requirements of the 12,700-ton battleship program.
Russian projects. A total of five such designs were submitted: four by engineers from the Baltic Shipyard and one by D. V. Skvortsov, a shipbuilder from the St. Petersburg port. Unfortunately, D. V. Skvortsov failed to meet the MTC requirements—the displacement of the ship he designed reached 13,450 tons, which put an end to his project. The Baltic Shipyard's designs, however, were far more interesting. They were submitted to P. P. Tyrtov, the head of the Naval Ministry, for review, and he deemed two of the four designs highly promising. The vice admiral's verdict was as follows:
The Technical Committee, with the participation of several admirals, should review the submitted sketches without delay. Of these, I believe Sketches 1 and 2 best meet our requirements, but with a 6-inch upper armor belt, but I don't want to limit the Committee's choice. We just need to decide quickly which sketch to develop.
In light of the above, it can be concluded that K.K. Ratnik's designers accomplished the task. They succeeded in designing a battleship that met the requirements of the Naval Ministry. This was not possible with the Peresvet design and theoretical drawings, but when the designers were given free rein and allowed to use a twin-shaft propulsion system, they created a quite respectable design for an eighteen-knot battleship with twelve-inch guns and virtually the same displacement as the original Peresvet design (12,700 tons versus 12,674 tons).
This was a remarkable achievement, but the overly stringent requirements for displacement and coal reserves left K.K. Ratnik no room for maneuver. He fulfilled the program's requirements for a 12,700-ton battleship, but was unable to exceed them. For example, its armor remained of the "English" type—with unarmored ends protected only by a carapace deck. Undoubtedly, the Baltic Shipyard's designs best met the MTK program for a 12,700-ton battleship—but that was all.
French project. The ship that A. Lagan undertook to build for the Russian Imperial fleet, exceeded the requirements set by the program—the technical specifications of the MTC—in a number of respects. The advantages of the French proposal are well known.
Firstly, it had a continuous armor belt along the waterline, from stem to sternpost. And not just one armor belt, but two: the main and the upper, which meant the upper armor edge was quite high above the waterline even at full displacement. This armor system was far more advanced than the "British" protection system adopted by our navy, in which the sides at the ends had no vertical armor, and the buoyancy of the bow and stern compartments below the waterline was provided by a carapace deck.
Secondly, there was the 40mm anti-mine armor bulkhead—an innovation that, at least in theory, looked very interesting. This bulkhead was located two meters from the side and was 84 meters long (in the initial design, 88,8 meters in the final version).
Thirdly, there's, of course, the turret-mounted placement of medium-caliber guns. This isn't just a matter of the turrets themselves, but rather their placement provided far better firing angles than casemates.
What was particularly appealing was that all these undeniable advantages were purchased, at first glance, at a seemingly insignificant price—an increase in displacement by just over 400 tons over what was stated in the program. But… Upon closer inspection, things weren't quite so clear-cut.
A. Lagan's project is the best. But at what cost?
To this day, there's a common online opinion that the need to engage foreign firms in the design of the battleship was primarily due to the inability of the domestic shipbuilding school to design a ship of this class that was modern at the time. But let's take a closer look at the characteristics of the Russian and French designs.
The heavy hull weight of the French battleship design is immediately noticeable – as the table shows, it accounts for 39,1% of the normal displacement, while for domestic designs this figure ranges from 36,9% to 38,1%. Did A. Lagan really approach the project carelessly? Of course not. As is well known, the "Frenchman" had two armored decks, one of which was continuous and located along the upper edge of the upper armor belt, while the second, located below the first, connected two mine-protection bulkheads.
So, judging by the Tsarevich's weight list, the anti-mine bulkheads and, possibly, the connecting deck, with a total weight of 769,9 tons, were included in the hull weight, not the armor. However, if we were to convert the hull weights of the Baltic Shipyard and A. Lagan designs to a single "coordinate system" for accurate comparison, it would hardly be appropriate to completely subtract the 769,9 tons from the French battleship's hull weight.
The fact is that the armored decks on the Peresvet-class battleships were generally (or entirely, I don't know for sure) constructed as follows: there was a deck of shipbuilding steel of a certain thickness, up to 12,7 mm, on top of which armor plates were laid (even if they were made of the same shipbuilding steel). It can be assumed that the deck was considered part of the hull's weight, and the armor plates laid on it were considered part of the armor. In other words, without the deck armor, the Peresvet's hull still had decks. Meanwhile, the Tsarevich's weight of 769,9 tons most likely (and again, this is not certain) includes the anti-mine bulkheads and the entire deck—removing this would leave one of the decks missing entirely. Therefore, a direct comparison would be imprecise.
Here, I'd like to draw attention to the danger of comparing ship design weights: without detailed knowledge of where and how certain weights were included, making an accurate comparison based solely on general information about the weight of the hull, armor, artillery, etc. is extremely difficult. This is unless we're talking about structurally similar designs created by the same design team.
But let's return to the Baltic Shipyard and A. Lagan's designs. The fact that the French battleship was 400 (or, to be precise, 407) tons heavier is only half the story. Because the French shipbuilder gained another 402,4 tons by saving weight in various load areas, reducing them relative to the design specifications.
Not only did the future "Tsesarevich" turn out to be heavier than required, but the reduction of the standard coal supply from 1000 to 800 tons allowed the French to free up 200 tons for other needs. Furthermore, according to the program, a 12,700-ton battleship with a normal displacement was required to carry provisions for four months and water for two months. But A. Lagan reduced these amounts to two months and ten days, respectively. These may seem like small details, but this allowed the redistribution of another 202,35 tons to other cargoes.
In total, A. Lagan' received 809,35 tons for deviations from the specifications, but that's not all. The Baltic Shipyard's conservatism in estimating the weight of the power plant played a significant role. The fact is that A. Lagan' allocated 1527 tons for this, with a machine output of 16,300 hp, which gave a specific power of the plant of 10,7 hp per ton. At the same time, the Baltic Shipyard determined the weight of a weaker machine with 15,000 hp at a whopping 1830 tons (the battleship's design was 12,700 tons) or 1750 tons (the battleship's design was 13,000 tons). Accordingly, the specific power of the mechanisms, according to the Baltic Shipyard, should have been only 8,2-8,6 hp/t.
And here K.K. Ratnik completely misjudged and significantly underestimated the capabilities of the domestic manufacturer. Thus, the engines and boilers of the battleship Borodino, manufactured by the Franco-Russian Plants Society based on French designs, with a design capacity of 16,300 hp, actually weighed only 1420,1 tons. As for the Baltic Shipyard, when creating the power plant for the battleship Emperor Alexander III, it aimed for a capacity of 15,800 hp with a weight of 1527 tons, but during testing, the capacity actually reached 16,250 hp.
Given the above, nothing prevented our designers from reducing the weight of the mechanisms in the 12,700-ton battleship design to 1500 tons or even less. But this wasn't done, and as a result, A. Lagan gained an additional 303 tons of weight—although this time, it was the fault of our shipbuilders.
So it was that, due to increased displacement, reduced coal, food, and water reserves, as well as our designers' errors in reducing the weight of the mechanisms, A. Lagan gained an additional 1112 tons of weight, which he could have spent on strengthening the armor, armament, and other needs. Is it any wonder he ended up with a more formidable battleship?
And another important detail. Weights are important, but the ship's internal volume is also important. The French battleship carried only 1350 tons of coal at full displacement, while the Baltic Shipyard's design carried 2000 tons, which obviously required our designers to provide more space for coal storage. Given the ship's smaller displacement, this obviously complicated the design.
Overall, it can be concluded that the advantages of the French battleship design for "the needs of the Far East" over domestic designs stem not from the backwardness of the Russian design school, but from the fact that A. Lagan had the opportunity to select a more suitable prototype and, in doing so, allowed himself to ignore some of the requirements imposed by the MTC on the designed ship. In terms of compliance with the technical specifications, the Baltic Shipyard clearly won. It was they who submitted designs that most closely matched the battleship construction program developed and approved by the MTC. However, the Baltic Shipyard's battleship design proved inferior to the French one in terms of combat performance.
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