So I'm perusing the Russian naval history sites as I do from time to time and ran across the Imperatritsa Mariya class dreadnought. Specs look kinda good for BS, four triple 12" turrets, twenty 5" secondaries, four torpedo tubes, four shafts, two rudders, 10" belt, wide/shorter design. My question is that the rudders are inline with neither sitting in front of a prop. Anybody have any thoughts on the turning ability of such a setup? This boats slow as hell and would need some amount of turning ability to bring all that fire power to bear. Steve
It will do the minimum speed of 22knts. I am not sure how efficient the in-line rudders are though. I love the Russian ships though.
If you could fit all the cannon in it, it would make one evil Big-Gun warship. At 24 knots you can still harrass merchants, and entice Fast BB's to protect their defenseless charges. The whole idea with slowboats, I have found, is to let the enemy come to you, then chew them to bits with superior cannon density. 12 barrels, plus torps, in a short fat hull makes for a fast BB's nightmare. It's the old "barrels/hull length" equation.
A ship like that, with its turrets evenly spaced along its hull, will be an extremely difficult build even in 1:96 scale. And while those inline rudders will make it steer better than other ships in reverse, it will not turn as well as tandem-rudder dreadnoughts can. You'd probably get much better results with a VU, QE, or Baden. Plus it's ugly. The only thing I'll say for it is the secondary guns are excellently placed, if you want to build a ship with all secondaries instead of primaries.
I'm not so sure it'd be such a hard build, if canister-type cannon were used, there's still be a fair amount of volume left in the hull for the essentials. Use one motor and gear drive to run two of the four shafts and drag props to assist turning, It'd be a handful for pretty much anything in big-gun to tackle. Having the ability to turn in reverse wouldn't offset it's miserable top speed in fastgun though, so it'd be a hug-n-slug warship for them. Still, it'd be an interesting opponent, different from the current crop of VU's and Badens.
Nikki, She's the Empress Maria of the Imperial Russian Navy. She and her two sisters were built for the Black Seas fleet to counter Turkish aspirations in the area. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_battl...tsa_Mariya
Sorry for the thread necromancy but what about this one? I think I would skip arming the 12" guns and go with the secondaries.
I guess this would be the Italian equivalent to the Russian Empress Maria, the Dante Alighieri. Four triple 12" turrets and she also had the dual inline rudders. Secondaries seem to be less than the Empress Maria.
I just love the turret layouts of these ships. I'd love to see one of these with their turrets slewing from side to side delivering those twelve gun broadsides.
