Maximum battleship

A preliminary design (no.1) for a 70,000 ton battleship based upon the proposal of Senator Benjamin Tillman, comparable to the later "Montana" design of 1940

"Maximum Battleship" Design no.1

The "Maximum battleships," also known as the "Tillman battleships," were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 upon the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) of the United States Navy. They helped influence design work on the and first South Dakota classes of battleships. The plans prepared for the senator were preserved by C&R in the first of its "Spring Styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925. “Maximum battleships” referred to the largest-possible battleships the U.S. Navy could afford to construct and field while still being able to utilize the Panama Canal.

A preliminary design (no.2) for a 70,000 ton battleship, differing from Design 1 in having 24 16-inch guns in 4 sextuple turrets in exchange for reduced armor

"Maximum Battleship" Design no.2

Context

During the years leading up to World War I, some members of the U.S. Congress were growing frustrated with what they perceived to be chronic overspending by the U.S. Navy on battleships.

A preliminary design (no.3) for a 63,500 ton battleship based upon the proposal of Senator Benjamin Tillman with a higher speed but lighter displacement

"Maximum Battleship" Design no.3

The only limits on the potential size of an American battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the Panama Canal. The locks measure roughly , and so the "maximum battleships" were . The Panamax draft limit during the designing of these battleships was , however the Department of the Navy required that all designs be limited to only in draft.

Designs

A preliminary design (no.4) for an 80,000 ton battleship based upon the proposal of Senator Benjamin Tillman. It was a mixture of the best designs in armor and firepower, paying for this in increased displacement and slower speed.

"Maximum Battleship" Design no,4

Tillman's first request for designs of so-called "maximum battleship" in 1912–1913 led to several estimates for battleships unconstrained by cost. Created by the US Navy Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R), these ships would displace up to and carry 14 inch guns. Although C&R was "appalled," in the words of naval historian Norman Friedman, by the extravagance of these designs, they admitted that far larger warships could transit the Panama Canal's locks, which, due to the US's geography, were often held to be the final limiting factor on the size of a US warship. Such larger designs would be often and seriously proposed within only a few years.

In 1916, Tillman repeated his request, and C&R produced another series of design studies. C&R drew up four blueprints, all ships having varying characteristics despite being built on the same hull: Template:Bulleted list

Comparisons to other US Navy battleships

The Tillman designs all included five casemate guns mounted aft, two on each side and one at the tip of the stern. Similar "stern chasers" had been previously mounted in Nevada, but were omitted from the . These casemates were a return to an older design idea; American battleship designers had abandoned hull-mounted casemates after the . They had transpired to be too "wet" – heavy seas rendered them unusableTemplate:Sndand they had been removed from all earlier classes.

	Tillman I	Tillman II	Tillman III	Tillman IV	Tillman IV-1	Tillman IV-2
Design	13 Dec 1916	13 Dec 1916	13 Dec 1916	29 Dec 1916	30 Jan 1917	30 Jan 1917	8 Jul 1918	9 Jun 1938	6 Feb 1940
Displace- ment
Length
Beam
Draft
Speed
Main battery	(12) , 50-caliber guns in four triple turrets	(24) , 50-caliber guns in four six-gun turrets	(12) , 50-caliber guns in four triple turrets	(24) , 50-caliber guns in four six-gun turrets	(13) , 50-caliber guns in five twin and one triple turret	(15) , 50-caliber guns in five triple turrets	(12) , 50-caliber guns in four triple turrets	(9) , 50-caliber guns in three triple turrets	(12) , 50-caliber guns in four triple turrets
Belt armor
Barbette armor		}
Conning Tower armor

A design intended to make the earlier designs of the "Tillman" battleships more feasible, with a displacement of 80,000 tons, 13 18-inch guns, and a 16-inch armor belt

"Maximum Battleship" Design IV-1

Practically very similar to design IV-1, the IV-2 simply placed the 18-inch guns into a uniform triple-turret configuration and moved the midships turrets further back

"Maximum Battleship" Design IV-2

Fate of the designed battleships

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited naval armaments, causing the cancellation of the South Dakotas and halting all consideration of the "maximum battleships."

See also

• USN 1934 "Maximum Battleship" study.

Bibliography

• Friedman, Norman. Battleship Design and Development, 1905–1945. New York: Mayflower Books, 1978. Template:ISBN. Template:Catalog lookup link.

External links

• An extensive article about the Tillman battleships, including a look at possible designs for "Tillman battlecruisers.". Retrieved 5 May 2012
• Tillman battleships entry at Global Security
• Design for 80,000-ton battleship prepared by C&R for Senator Tillman, dated 29 December 1916, from U.S. Naval Historical Center. Retrieved 5 May 2012.
• "Construction of battleships", includes the 1912 resolution
• The Shipscribe article on the Bureau of Ships' "Spring Styles" Book # 1 (1911–1925). This specific webpage publicly preserves, among other things, the "maximum battleship" designs as digital photographs from the first "Spring Styles" US Navy catalog, and describes how they were presented therein. Quoting Shipscribe's About page: "The "Spring Styles" drawings were added on 26 April 2015... following the deletion of the Online Library of Selected Images from the web site of the Naval History and Heritage Command."