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Post by captainwrungel on May 24, 2019 16:59:07 GMT -6
Is it impossible to build up-gunned cruiser killers like the Deutschland-class or Alaska in this game without them being re-classed as BCs and given corresponding combat roles? Right now, if I go for 11-inch guns or above, it automatically gets re-classed regardless of the rest of the ship's characteristics.
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Post by aeson on May 24, 2019 17:13:57 GMT -6
The Deutschland type is a legal CA design if you keep the design displacement at or below 10,000 tons. Alaska, Scharnhorst, B65, and similar vessels are and probably should remain battlecruisers/battleships within the game.
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Post by ramjb on May 24, 2019 17:25:14 GMT -6
Scharnhorst was a battleship in everything. It's name should not even in a discussion like this; the only ones who called them "battlecruisers" were the british when the ships were declared by the germans as 26000 tonners capable of 32 knots and 9x11''. Basic engineering math says that if you pack 9x11'' in a 32 knot hull displacing 26000 tons, that ship can't have too much armor. Fast ship with capital ship weapons yet not a lot of armor....Hence - the british thought it was a battlecruiser. In truth the Scharnhorsts actually displaced almost 32000 tons standard and had 40% of that displacement alloted to armor (that's actually a slightly larger % of armor displacement than many battleships and light years ahead of any battlecruiser ever designed). Her external belt was actually thicker than Bismarck's... Hence, her main guns might have been tiny for one, but she was a battleship. Something the germans were only too aware of, their design traces back to WW1 Bayern and König, not to the Derrflingers or Mackensens. They also were classed as such as Schlatchschiffen (not Grosse Kreuzer nor Schlatchkreuzer). Not that navies classifications really matter here, but it goes on to prove what the germans built those shils like, and what they wanted them to be. Alaska was a battlecruiser whatever the americans wanted to call them. Their classification was kind of a semantic pirouette to avoid calling them Battlecruisers, a classification the US Navy wanted to avoid at all costs, but semantics aside one can hardly debate that a ship with those characteristics was just that. B-65s had they happened would've also been battlecruisers. Fast ships with capital ship sized weapons but without enough armor to play a role in the battleline. They just fit the definition like a glove. And no, in game there's no way a 30.000 ton ship with 9x12'' weapons is going to be acceptable as a heavy cruiser. For very good reasons . As for the Deutchland goes, I think it's nice that the devs went out of their way to allow ships with 6x11'' to be classified as CAs, but I think the 10k ton limit is too low. Not even Deutchland (the namesake of the class) displaced that, and both Scheer and particularily so Graf Spee displaced a couple extra thousand tons. Placing that limit at 12k and 6x11'' guns would make more sense, as a result; as it is it's a bit too strict and really doesn't allow for a ship like those: it allows for the weapons and the speed, but not for the actual armor those ships carried. Not that I, personally, would build any ship like that. I don't think they're optimal at all and I'm the kind of guy who goes for efficiency. But for flavor and maybe to go for something different, not just for the sake of efficiency, maybe the game should have a bit more generous stats allowing for such a ship to be classed as CA.
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Post by yemo on May 24, 2019 17:47:51 GMT -6
ramjbNah, Scharnhorst was a battlecruiser, not a battleship. It just followed the german battlecruiser philosophy (armor+speed at the cost of firepower), not the british (firepower+speed at the cost of armor) one. I agree with the Alaska class, that that was a battlecruiser as well. An argument could even be made for Iowa being the battlecruiser version of the next generation, while Montana would have been the battleship pendant, in line with the G3/N3 pairing 20 years earlier. In that context it makes some sense to differentiate between Alaska and Iowa, since those two are a full size apart.
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Post by yemo on May 24, 2019 17:51:58 GMT -6
As for the Deutchland goes, I think it's nice that the devs went out of their way to allow ships with 6x11'' to be classified as CAs, but I think the 10k ton limit is too low. Not even Deutchland (the namesake of the class) displaced that, and both Scheer and particularily so Graf Spee displaced a couple extra thousand tons. Placing that limit at 12k and 6x11'' guns would make more sense, as a result; as it is it's a bit too strict and really doesn't allow for a ship like those: it allows for the weapons and the speed, but not for the actual armor those ships carried. Not that I, personally, would build any ship like that. I don't think they're optimal at all and I'm the kind of guy who goes for efficiency. But for flavor and maybe to go for something different, not just for the sake of efficiency, maybe the game should have a bit more generous stats allowing for such a ship to be classed as CA. Imho the classifications should be outsourced to a config file. So that modders can finetune it and implement a better progression scheme.
Eg distinguish between battleship and battlecruiser by weight of machinery in relation to total weight. Larger than 8% => battlecruiser.
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Post by secondcomingofzeno on May 24, 2019 18:10:13 GMT -6
Scharnhorst and Iowa are better described as Fast battleships. They're just too heavily armoured to be classified as a battle-cruiser.
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Post by aeson on May 24, 2019 18:16:44 GMT -6
Scharnhorst was a battleship in everything. Scharnhorst is an ugly duckling. Its armament is woefully inadequate for a battleship of its time and it's not sufficiently heavily armored to even plausibly make up for that; meanwhile, it's excessively heavily armored for a cruiser hunter-killer. About the only capital-scale near-contemporaries that it might've been good against were the Alaskas, Dunkerques, and hypotheticals like the Japanese B65. North Carolina has more throw weight in a single turret than Scharnhorst does in its entire main battery, can penetrate any part of Scharnhorst's armor well beyond the range at which its armor risks penetration by Scharnhorst's 28cm guns, and is only about 10% larger by standard displacement.
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Post by Blothorn on May 24, 2019 18:18:50 GMT -6
All ships ever officially classified as battlecruisers (or comparable in other languages--e.g., capital ships classified differently from battleships) fall into one archetype: comparatively sized to contemporary battleships, sacrificing either armor or armament for speed. I think the distinction simply ceased to be useful in the face of increasing battleship speeds--where capital ships of 1906-1925 had a fairly bimodal distribution between battleships and battlecruisers, battleships built in the 30s and 40s have a pretty uniform distribution of speeds.
Notably, no ship designated a battlecruiser was just a smaller, faster battleship--I don't think calling the small battleships (Scharnhorst, Dunkerque) or large cruisers (Alaska) battlecruisers is very helpful.
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Post by ramjb on May 24, 2019 18:21:52 GMT -6
ramjb Nah, Scharnhorst was a battlecruiser, not a battleship. It just followed the german battlecruiser philosophy (armor+speed at the cost of firepower), not the british (firepower+speed at the cost of armor) one. Disagreed. The ship design traces back directly to the WW1 battleship line, not to the WW1 battlecruiser line. You can see that (amongst in many other details), in the fact that the Twins were given triple screw propulsion, exactly like WW1 battleships had, while the whole battlecruiser line had quadruple screw configurations. The question about the Scharnhorst class weapons is very long (not to mention off topic here) to tackle here but can be summed up in two things: readiness and politics. By the time the twins were being built the 380mm turret design wasn't complete. Both ships had already been delayed for years (let's remember that initially they were supposed to be just larger versions of the deutchslands but repeated changes and upscales on the design which demanded beginning the design from scratch had already delayed their completion several times over) and it was ruled out that more delays were not acceptable. And on the other hand we all know the whole tale about Hitler, 380mm guns, and not wanting to antagonize the british too much which also decided things towards 11'' guns. Basically, the main battery of those ships wasn't decided on design grounds based on the role of the warship, doctrine or naval philosophy (what you seem to suggest, that she received 11'' guns because going for light guns was standard practice for german battlecruisers), but on practical terms of "we can't delay them anymore" and in political terms of "we don't want the british to be too concerned this early". The final result was a terrible main battery for a battleship - but the ship still was designed and built as a battleship....and so a battleship it was. A terrible one at that, but battleship nonetheless. Just for the sake of comparison, the best protected battlecruiser ever built (one I actually would argue was the first real "fast battleship" and not a battlecruiser at all) was HMS Hood. Completed with an armor layout comparable and, in some details superior, to that of a Queen Elizabeth class battleship when she was built, something wich was unprecedented in a british battlecruiser (and that still produced a better armored ship than what any german battlecruiser had ever been). HMS Hood, being the battlecruiser that devoted the most displacement % in armor ever, still devoted 30% of said displacement to armor. The Scharnhorsts twins invested 40%. They're just in completely different leagues just from the get go, which only goes on to further prove the nature of the Twins as battleships. That they were terrible for the job nobody denies, but they still were what they were .
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Post by ramjb on May 24, 2019 18:39:59 GMT -6
All ships ever officially classified as battlecruisers (or comparable in other languages--e.g., capital ships classified differently from battleships) fall into one archetype: comparatively sized to contemporary battleships, sacrificing either armor or armament for speed. That was a demand from the role based on technology of the time. Since HMS Hood was completed, until work on Alaska began, no battlecruisers were ever built. Some were laid down (the japanese 16'' BC line), but none completed. Technology progression in the intermission, which was of more than 20 years, changed things a lot and changed the shape of those ships a lot aswell. In the 1900s and 1910s you couldn't get a ship big enough to carry guns of 12 inches or more, to hit 25+ knots without investing in huge machinery layouts to produce the demanded power. As a result the ships needed to be even bigger to carry the needed machinery, which in turn needed more tonnage devoted to the armor to cover the larger ship, which in turn made the ship even bigger, which in turn needed even more machinery power to propel it at the speed it was supposed to go, in a vicious circle of upscaling displacements and sizes. The end results were ships that were vastly bigger than their battleship counterparts. We can see that in a comparsion between a Lion class BCs and the concurrent dreadnoughts that were built alongside them, the WW1 KGV class. HMS Lion was MUCH bigger and displaced a lot more, because it needed such massive space for it's machinery that there was no other way to get those guns and armor around at the 27 knots she was nominally good for. Fast forward 20 years. Suddenly you have much more compact machineries that produce a lot more power per unit of volume that in WW1. You can pack a massive ammount of power in much smaller spaces, so when you design a ship with exactly the same role as a WW1 battlecruiser had, just adapted to WW2 standards (instead of going out and turn enemy armored cruisers to a pulp while being immune to them now it was going out and turning enemy HEAVY Cruisers to a pulp while being immune to them), suddenly you don't need ships that must be much larger than battleships, but ones that as long as you keep weapon sizes at check, can be smaller. Which is another consideration. pre-WW1 ACs were protected with levels of armor that were hard to beat for even a 12'' inch gun (armor thicknesses of up to 6'' or even more in some cases). Advancemens in projectile shape and quality, mixed with the much thinner armor of the heavy cruisers of WW2 meant that, in WW2, a 12'' gun would trounce any cruiser with ease. In WW1 battecruisers demanded guns as big as the ones mounted in battleships to fullfit their role because shell technology wasn't as good, penetrations weren't as big, and the ships they were designed to destroy had very thick armors. Yet in WW2 battlecruisers did not need guns of the same size of battleship's (no need for 14, 15 or 16'' guns, 12'' would do the job). Hence you could pack guns that were considerably smaller than battleship guns in your battlecruiser. That already is conductive to a smaller ship on it's own...but if you add it on top of the already massive saving in displacement, size, and tonnage you got from your much more efficient powerplants, you end up in ships that were smaller than BBs, not bigger than them (as it had been the case 20 years before) even while they fullfit exactly the same role. The whole point can be summed up that, as long as you qualify and class ships for their role (which is my personal standard), the Alaska was a battlecruiser. Because that ship was conceived as a cruiser killer, the same as WW1 battlecruisers had been. That it was smaller than battleships, instead of larger as her siblings of 20 years prior had been, was a sub-product of how much technology had advanced. Not of a different nature. Hence, she was a battlecruiser, through and through.
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Post by yemo on May 24, 2019 19:35:55 GMT -6
ramjb Nah, Scharnhorst was a battlecruiser, not a battleship. It just followed the german battlecruiser philosophy (armor+speed at the cost of firepower), not the british (firepower+speed at the cost of armor) one. Disagreed. The ship design traces back directly to the WW1 battleship line, not to the WW1 battlecruiser line. You can see that (amongst in many other details), in the fact that the Twins were given triple screw propulsion, exactly like WW1 battleships had, while the whole battlecruiser line had quadruple screw configurations. The question about the Scharnhorst class weapons is very long (not to mention off topic here) to tackle here but can be summed up in two things: readiness and politics. By the time the twins were being built the 380mm turret design wasn't complete. Both ships had already been delayed for years (let's remember that initially they were supposed to be just larger versions of the deutchslands but repeated changes and upscales on the design which demanded beginning the design from scratch had already delayed their completion several times over) and it was ruled out that more delays were not acceptable. And on the other hand we all know the whole tale about Hitler, 380mm guns, and not wanting to antagonize the british too much which also decided things towards 11'' guns. Basically, the main battery of those ships wasn't decided on design grounds based on the role of the warship, doctrine or naval philosophy (what you seem to suggest, that she received 11'' guns because going for light guns was standard practice for german battlecruisers), but on practical terms of "we can't delay them anymore" and in political terms of "we don't want the british to be too concerned this early". The final result was a terrible main battery for a battleship - but the ship still was designed and built as a battleship....and so a battleship it was. A terrible one at that, but battleship nonetheless. Just for the sake of comparison, the best protected battlecruiser ever built (one I actually would argue was the first real "fast battleship" and not a battlecruiser at all) was HMS Hood. Completed with an armor layout comparable and, in some details superior, to that of a Queen Elizabeth class battleship when she was built, something wich was unprecedented in a british battlecruiser (and that still produced a better armored ship than what any german battlecruiser had ever been). HMS Hood, being the battlecruiser that devoted the most displacement % in armor ever, still devoted 30% of said displacement to armor. The Scharnhorsts twins invested 40%. They're just in completely different leagues just from the get go, which only goes on to further prove the nature of the Twins as battleships. That they were terrible for the job nobody denies, but they still were what they were .
Imho the simple fact that they did have 11'' guns excludes them from being called a battleship, regardless of design, practicalities, wishes etc. Contemporary gun caliber is an essential part of the concept of a battleship. What if we switch out the triple 11 inchers for quad 8 inchers? Still a battleship? Or remove most of the deck and belt armor from Dreadnought? Still a battleship? Or lower the speed of the Nelsons to 14knots? Still battleships? There has to be a point where something is not just a bad example of a classification, but not part of the class at all.
Give it 15 inch guns (or 14 inch ones at that) and we can debate where battleship begins and battlecruiser ends. But not with 11 inch guns in the 1930s...
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Post by aeson on May 24, 2019 19:45:57 GMT -6
I'm thinking of a large surface combatant designed with an eye towards commerce raiding, overwhelming period cruisers, and fighting a fast, relatively lightly-armed and -armored period capital ship while avoiding engagements with typical period battleships. Of the terms "battleship" and "battlecruiser," which best describes this ship?
Using role-based classification, Scharnhorst can very easily be argued to be a battlecruiser. Perhaps its primary role is that of a heavy commerce raider - traditionally a cruiser role, and one which many of the antecedents of the battlecruiser were meant to fulfill. It very much fits the "fast enough to out-run anything it doesn't out-gun, powerful enough to defeat anything it can't out-run" battlecruiser philosophy - especially while Dunkerque and Strasbourg remained the only modern fast battleships. It is very clearly at a serious disadvantage against any near-contemporary battleships other than Dunkerque and Strasbourg - the most battlecruiser-like of the fast battleships, developed in large part in response to a stimulus very similar to that which triggered the development of the first battlecruisers. The degree to which it was armored is pretty much the only thing about Scharnhorst which is distinctly unlike a traditional battlecruiser.
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Post by amurtiger on May 24, 2019 20:33:22 GMT -6
ramjb HMS Hood, being the battlecruiser that devoted the most displacement % in armor ever, still devoted 30% of said displacement to armor. The Scharnhorsts twins invested 40%. They're just in completely different leagues just from the get go, which only goes on to further prove the nature of the Twins as battleships. That they were terrible for the job nobody denies, but they still were what they were . This is actually kinda silly thinking if you follow it through. Take a turret off the hood and shrink the machinery down thanks to 20 years in technological development and you'll find the hood closing in on that 40% number pretty quickly. Battlecruisers as a rule sacrificed either Armour or weaponry for the sake of speed. British tended to sacrifice Armour and Germans tended to sacrifice weaponry. Even with 6x15" guns I'd argue that its throw weight would make it a battlecruiser.
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Post by ramjb on May 25, 2019 0:47:14 GMT -6
Imho the simple fact that they did have 11'' guns excludes them from being called a battleship
280mm guns were capital ship size guns. In fact the only reason of the Deutschland "PR" stunt of getting called "Pocket battleship" by the british was her guns. The germans contributed to it by giving the ship her own unique designation "Panzerschiffe" (armored ship), wich lend to the idea that on top of those guns the ship had good armor.
The problem is that Deutchland was a class armored against 6'' gunfire at best designed for a cruiser role - commerce raiding, so when the time to be practical came around (meaning, wartime) they got immediately reclassed by the germans as Heavy Cruisers (Schwere Kreuzer).
Meanwhile the Scharnhorsts were never "Schlatchkreuzer" - they were classed as "Schatchschiffe", battleship, and remained as battleships during the war. Because when the time came to be practical, those ships were still battleships in practice too.
A 32000 ton warship armed with 11'' guns is a capital ship. Once you're a capital ship you're either a battlecruiser or a battleship. By armor thickness, protection scheme, given role, design lineage (Traced directly back to Bayern, and base itself of Bismarck and later H-39), Scharnhorst was a battleship. Pisspoor one by any accounts, but battleship nonetheless.
I'm thinking of a large surface combatant designed with an eye towards commerce raiding, overwhelming period cruisers, and fighting a fast, relatively lightly-armed and -armored period capital ship while avoiding engagements with typical period battleships. Of the terms "battleship" and "battlecruiser," which best describes this ship?
The scharnhorst class doesn't meet any of those points...other than being large. She wasn't designed with an eye towards commerce raiding. It ended being the Twins' main role because of practical reasons during WW2 (belonging to a fleet that couldn't seek a major surface battle, and being too weak herself as designed), the same many other tools of war were designed with one idea in mind but then because of circunstances had to be used in a very different role even while they weren't well suited for it.
In fact is VERY hard to tell where was the eye pointed towards during her design process in each of the iterations of her design before the germans settled for the final one, but, if anything, commerce raider was the role she lost in the upscaling process; as proven by the abandonment of the initially intended diesel powerplant for a turbine one, just to name one, and the redesign process restart beginning in the Bayern class after the original design plans had been abandoned.
The initial design concepts were of a larger Panzerschiffe with the sole objective of hunting convoys. The later upscales were not: Scharnhorst was designed with the SPECIFIC role in mind of countering the french Dunkerke class of light battleships. She was designed for battling a capital ship, not to fight enemy cruisers (a role that was never contemplated in her whole design process). A ship designed specifically to fight and beat a capital ship is, by definition, a battleship, so that alone qualifies her as a battleship, even if the 44% of her allotted tonnage devoted to armor remains ignored (And it shouldn't be).
Dunkerke had lighter protection but was an overall more balanced ship. But Scharnhorst was far better armored and much larger. Barring luck-of-war, golden twinkees, etc from the equation the fact is that in an one on one matchup the French ship had little chance to win, even if Scharnhorst had lighter guns. No surprise, as the german ship was designed specifically to beat the french one.
The role of Scharnhorst when designed wasn't "overwhelming period cruisers while avoiding engagements with typical period battleships". It was fighting one of those "typical period battleship" (Dunkerke might have been the lightest battleship, but she also was the most modern, in fact, of the world at the time of her design and launch). That's the role of a battleship.
This is actually kinda silly thinking if you follow it through. Take a turret off the hood and shrink the machinery down thanks to 20 years in technological development and you'll find the hood closing in on that 40% number pretty quickly.
Mental acrobatics can accomplish much but serve to no practical purpose.
a) "Take a turret off Hood and shrink the machinery down" - then you end with a different ship. Not HMS Hood. Whatever that theoretical ship would've been is irrelevant in a discusion about REAL ones.
b) "Thanks to 20 years in technological development" - Sorry, Hood was built in 1920. Argumental gymnastics nonetheless, that ship was designed as, and built as, and ended up being a battlecruiser (though I repeat that by accident the british stumbled with the concept of Fast Battleship, which the ship far more resembled)
c) "And you'll find the hood closing in to that 40% number" - I'd love to know where you get that calculation from. Source?. Link. Because mere guesstimation doesn't cut it here. Besides, to be precise, the Scharnhorsts went to sea with a 44% of armor devoted to armor. Which, once again, is lights ayears and whole leagues ahead of what any battlecruiser ever devoted to protection. I know I mentioned 40% before but I tend not to be too anal in giving statistics (unless the circunstances require it XD).
The mere fact is that the Scharnhorst class had a 350mm turret face and main belt armor (ignoring the internal inclined deck that's only weaker out of battleships of the 30s and 40s than KGV and Yamato. Including the 105mm inclined internal deck, only Yamato had stronger lateral protection). She had a weaker main deck armor for the time, but still between 2 to 3.75'' while they point at an outdated design (again, Scharnhorsts were enlarged Bayerns) can't be qualified as "un-battleship-like".
When the german designers and naval architects began work on the final iteration of Scharnhorst, the starting point was Bayern. When the german designers and naval architects began work on Bismarck the starting point was Scharnhorst. She was one more of a line of battleships that was interrupted by 20 years of post-WW1, a weak one and one with many weaknesses and design shortcomings.
But that she was a battleship, there's little question about it in my mind.
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Post by ramjb on May 25, 2019 2:22:09 GMT -6
I'm going to elaborate a bit because I'm perceiving that the problem here can be based on a wrong perception, that being that Battlecruisers sacrified EITHER speed ***OR*** armor in order to achieve speed.
That's obviously a concept that seems to be drawn from the idea that German battlecruisers of WW1 had equal protection than battleships and only sacrifized weapon sizes. And THAT is incorrect.
First let's begin on the other side of the fence, with the UK. British battleships didn't sacrifize only armor for speed- they also sacrifized weapons. Each british BC was ordered besides a contemporary Battleship. Each british BC had lighter weapons than their contemporary battleships. The original series, the Invincible class, and their successor class, Indefatigable, had 8x12'' guns, their corresponding contemporary battleships had 10. Lion and Tiger, concurrent to KGV, had 8x13.5'' guns. KGV had 10. Outrageous and Curious we can ignore, much more with Spurious (they were abnormal in every way) but even Refit and Repair...sorry...Renown and Repulse, had 6x15'' guns. Revenges had 8x15''.
British BCs sacrificed weapons AND armor for speed. Not just armor. Until Hood happened, that sacrifized neither; had the same protection and weapons as the latest british battleships, and ended up displacing 45000 tons as a result and costing a fortune.
Back to the germans. The idea that the germans only sacrifized weapons is also incorrect. They did sacrifice armor - they just didn't sacrifize as much as the british counterparts did. They also were designed for short range operations in the North Sea, which allowed for far better subdivision at the cost of being cramped, something the British didn't go for as their BCs were supposed to operate worldwide. The end result is that they ended up being extremely tough.
At any rate and again, German BCs weren't armored up to battleship standards either: This can be easily seen as the germans also ordered BCs concurrent with dreadnought classes:
Von der Tann- contemporary to Nassau. Compared armors (BC first, BB second):
Belt: 10 inches in VdT, 12 in Nassau Turret faces: 9 inches in VdT, 11 in Nassau. CT: 10 inches in VdT, 12 in Nassau.
Next in line we have Moltke - contemporary to the Helgoland class. Compared armors:
Belt: 11 vs 12 inches Turret faces: 9 vs 12 inches CT: 11 vs 12 inches.
If we move all the way up to Derfflinger (correspondent to the König class): Belt: 12 vs 14 inches Turret faces: 11 vs 12 inches CT: 12 vs 12 inches
we see that Defflinger still was not up to battleship standards.
Finally Mackensen (correspondent to Bayern): Belt: 12 vs 14 inches Turret faces: 11 vs 14 inches CT: 12 vs 16 inches
and that Bayern took it to the next level.
German battlecruisers didn't sacrifize weapons for speed. They sacrifized weapons AND armor for speed - they just did it in a much more balanced way than the british one and as a result resulted a whole order of magnitude better protected as a result.
But they did sacrifize armor too. They followed a completely different doctrine than the one that ended up in Scharnhorst, a warship that, as already mentioned, was the direct descendant of the Bayern and the WW1 line of german Battleships. Not of the battlecruisers.
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