Post by exltcmts on Apr 16, 2021 10:32:23 GMT -6
What has to be kept in mind is that the Washington Treaty or something like it was almost inevitable after the Great War. Many people believed that the naval rivalry between the British and Germans was a major cause of the war. Then there were the massive costs involved in building and sustaining such navies in a period of economic recession and government retrenchment. It is simply not possible that the building programs of the navies of the Great Powers were going to be executed in full and as planned. Even had there been no arms limitations, the economy, political pressure and governmental spending priorities would have altered, delayed or cancelled much of the naval building programs in place at the end of the war and before.
Royal Navy - The British Empire came out of the Great War with renewed prestige, and with a massive war debt (much of it held by US banks), the promise of social programs that kept the troops and people motivated and a recession as government spending declined. In the fiscal year for 1918, the Naval Estimates exceeded 350,000,000 pounds sterling. For the 1920 Fiscal Year, the estimates were for 157,528,800 pounds, a decrease of over half. In 1923, it was 58,000,000 pounds. Like the aftermath of WW2, the government concentrated on rebuilding the merchant marine, deliberately cancelling warships to open slips and docks for commercial construction. The there were other issues. The planned G3 and N3 classes had hit the limit for British warships in tonnage and length. There were only four building slips for warships (there were two commercial slips for large passenger liners) that could build ships of 45,000 tons and over 825 feet in length. There were only five dry docks in the Empire (six when the KGV dock in Singapore was completed) that could handle such ships. This limitation would remain in existence through WW2 because the massive costs that would be involved in expanding warship construction and infrastructure. In a way, this was a price for Britain being first into the Industrial Age. Machinery was issue as the RN had remained conservative on the issue of steam plants, not adopting small tube boilers until 1918 and rejecting high pressure, high temperature plants when tests on destroyers in 1920-22 were less than successful. Armor plate was not an issue, but Britain was behind the US in adopting welding and developing protective plate that could be welded. They did develop "D" (Ducol) steel for welded construction that could be used as protective plating, but unlike STS, it rated somewhere between mild steel and homogenous/non-cemented armor. As far as guns, there would be no problem producing sufficient 16" and 18" guns, the British already having built and deployed an 18" L/40 gun, but Britain lagged behind the Germans, French and US in developing steel alloy hooped guns that were lighter for their bore size. The worse issues were, first, the over-reaction to the battle cruiser losses at Jutland, that were more the result of improper ammo handling than inherent flaws in British turrets, in more complex anti-flash systems and the inexperience of the British in designing and building three gun turrets. The 16" gun turrets that went on to arm the "Nelson" class still did not generate its theoretical rate of fire even in 1940. What was worse, the British came away from post-war armor and shell trials on ex-SMS Baden convinced that their shells were too heavy and too slow. The 16" Gun Mk.I (L/45) was the result, firing a 8crh, 2,048lbs AP shell at 2,700 fps, ranging to over 40,000 yards at 40 degrees with Mk.I rifling. The long bodied shell and the large charge resulted in increased and unacceptable erosion and a loss of accuracy at long range. New rifling (Mk.II) and de-rating the gun to 2,614 fps reduced range and penetration while improving service life and accuracy to just acceptable levels. The adoption of a heavier 6 crh shell (2,250lbs) would have resolved many of these issues at the cost of probable handling problems with the shorter shell, but the RN could not find the funds for a new shell for two ships until 1937, at which point they had run out of time. These same issues would have plagued the 18" gun Mk.II (L/45) and its three gun turret (it was to fired a 2,837lbs shell at 2,700 fps). While these would be the first British capital ships with an "all or nothing" armor system, had they followed the "Nelson" design, there would have been an "Achilles" heel, a space existing between the top of the sloped internal belt and the main armor deck. Also, the G3, in the opinion of its designer, would probably not make its designed speed. These ships, however, would have a new fire control system, the result of studies of the experience of the Great War. Unfortunately, the retention of DC power and of "step by step" transmission of data between the directors, Admiralty Fire Control Table (AFCT) and turrets would be less efficient than the American system adopted in the "Colorado" class. Still, the G3 class while classed as "battle cruisers" were really "fast battleships". The first four G3 ships were ordered in late 1921 for laying down in 1922, but were suspended during the Washington Treaty Conference. Had they been laid down, they would have been completed in 1926 given available funding and peacetime work schedules. David Brown gives 50-50 odds that they would never have been laid down and completed, given the economic situation in Britain in 1922. Four N3s would have been laid down, if funded, when the G3s were launched and would have completed in 1928, with four more G3s in 1930 and four more N3s in 1932. There would have been limited reconstruction of earlier classes, mainly the rebuilds of "Repulse" and "Renown" and bulging the rest of the "R" class battleships, the deployment of HACS, 4" AA guns and the 2pdr Mk.VIII automatic gun. The RN had the heaviest armed AA batteries on capital ships in the world in the 1930s. Unfortunately, they picked a non-tachymetric AA fire control system, that despite constant modification even into WW2, never equaled the performance of the tachymetric systems adopted by the US and Japan. In the meanwhile, all the 12" gun dreadnoughts, pre-dreadnoughts and armored cruisers were gone, for disposal, sale, disarmed or scrapped. The 13.5" gun super-dreadnoughts would be next, having gone into Reserve between 1922 and 1926, the crews going to new construction. On the other hand, the "E" class cruisers were probably the best light cruisers in the world when completed and the twin turret an excellent design applied to capital ship secondary battery and future cruisers. All cruisers of classes before the "C" classes would have been disposed of, except for the Australian "Town" class. British destroyers were also superior in layout and performance, leading to a number of exports to other navies. In submarines, the initial priority would be large patrol types for a Pacific war. British warship. With the German fleet gone, the only possible enemies were the Japanese and Italians. The British didn't take Mussolini seriously and expected the French Navy to handle the Italians with some assistance. The Japanese, on the other hand, were identified as the main threat in 1919 to Britain's interests in China and her SEA colonies. The war plan went pretty much like "Orange". The Japanese would be successful early, seizing Hong Kong and Shanghai and penetrating the SW Pacific to capture Brunei and its oil. The British, leaving a covering force in European waters would deploy the majority of the fleet to the East, initially on Indian Ocean and Australian ports/bases and eventually Singapore, when it was complete. From there, the British would establish a distant blockade of Japan with subs and cruisers, while moving forward to recapture Hong Kong and other points from which a close blockade and bombing campaign could be conducted. The IJN battle fleet would come out to break the blockade, the British Fleet would meet and defeat it in a "Jutland" some where south of Japan and the blockade and bombing would force the Japanese to admit defeat. The greater aggressiveness of Italy with its conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-36 and the rise of Hitler from 1933, drew more and more of the fleet to the Med and Home waters, putting this strategy in danger as less and less of the Fleet could be deployed to the Indian Ocean. But between 1922-1935, a British intervention with or without US support against Japan's actions in China would have gone this way. It should be noted that time went on, the British tried harder and harder to get the US to take a coordinated response to Japanese aggression. As far as the US, the British were determined to keep the entente that they had developed since 1850 and refused to contemplate a war with the US, despite the occasional Anglophobia of senior USN leaders in the 1920s. As an example, the US was excluded as a possible enemy that the British would confront under the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902.
US - Coming out of the Great War, the US was the most powerful industrial nation in the world and had gone from a debtor to holding massive British and French war debt. In 1922, when the British had no capital ships building (and a potential for four every two years from 1926) and the Japanese, four, the US had fifteen. There were six building slips that could build any ships that would fit through a Panama Canal lock and six that could build ships up to 725' long and 40,000 tons, with four more able to build 650' and 35,000 ton capital ships. The US had 560,000 tons of capital ships building when the British had zero and Japan had 166,000. There were six drydocks on the East Coast and two on the West and one at Pearl Harbor (1919) that could hold any ship that would fit through the Panama Canal. Between 1920 and 1922, the US built 32 - 16" L/45 and completed 81 16" L/50 guns with another 43 incomplete. In 1922, the "Tillman" design studies were not fantasy if they ever were. With those six building slips, the US could have laid down and completed six "Tillman IV" design battleships. The USN had an 18" gun half-complete in 1922. It had built 32 triple and three gun turrets. It was producing six of the most powerful warship machinery in history for the "Lexington" class "large scout cruisers" (the USN never designated the "Lexington" class as battle cruisers and did not consider them as such). If there was a fly in the ointment, it was armor plate. While the USN was satisfied it could produce quality homogenous plate at thicknesses up to 18", it was limiting itself to 13.5" thick modified Krupp formula cemented plate as the thickest that US plants could produce at a uniform high quality. On the other hand, the USN developed Special Treatment Steel, a steel that was within 98% effectiveness of Class "B" (homogenous, cemented armor was Class "A") plates and could be welded. More and more welding was being employed, producing lighter and stronger hulls and superstructures. On the commercial side there was the massive Hog Island complex (which was broken up and sold for scrap after the war). As an aside, David Brown asserts that the Washington Treaty saved the USN from being left with inferior ships compared to the British and Japanese. I cannot really see how the "South Dakota" class was inferior to the Japanese ships. She traded speed for protection and firepower. The "Lexington" class were in the eyes of the USN, not intended to engage in prolonged gunnery duels with other capital ships. They were intended to fight through the enemy screen for information and then be able to withdraw and outrun any ships that could defeat them. And there was plenty of time to revise the design. Not one of the class was more than 20% complete in 1922 and the design could have traded 6,000 tons for armor, say a 10" belt at fifteen degrees for 1.5 knots. But the real issue is that Mr. Brown forgets that this wasn't ALL of the US post-war building plan. These ships were authorized and funds appropriated for them in 1916. In 1918, Congress authorized TEN more battleships. The "spring style" designs for these ships between 1919 and 1922 were for the combination of "South Dakota" armor and guns with the "Lexington" machinery. This meant a battleship around 53,000 ton trial displacement, 13.5" belt sloped at 15 degrees, 12 - 16" L/50 Mk.2 guns (4 x 3) and 30 knots at 180,000shp (this plant actually developed over 200,000 shp on trials). Had the naval arms race continued into 1930s, six of these would be laid down in 1923-24 as the "Lexington' class were launched, completing in 1925-26, with the next four completing in 1927-28, at a time when the British would have just completed four N3 and four G3 in 1926, while the Japanese completed Tosa in 1923, Kaga in 1924, Akagi in 1925, Atago in 1926, Takao in 1927 and a replacement Amagi in 1928. The last four could easily have been built to an improved design at 60,000 tons, 27 knots and 12 - 18" L/50 guns, completing in 1928-29.
The problem was that Congress by 1919 had lost interest in a Navy "second to none" and would reduce the Navy's budget from $1,971,645,000 in 1919 to $508,155,000 in 1922 and $330,607,000 in 1923. There were sufficient funds to complete those ships on the stocks, if there were no Treaty. The USN might have converted all six "Lexingtons" to carriers or they might have junked two to get the funds and materiel to upgrade the protection of two ships as they completed the other two as carriers. Certainly all the pre-dreadnoughts, "South Carolina" and "Michigan" were gone as well as all the monitors and all the armored and protected armor cruisers other than the "Big Eight". If the 1916 program was completed, there can be no doubt all the 12" dreadnoughts would have gone and possibly the "New York" and "Texas". Even the unmodified "Pennsylvania" and "New Mexico" classes with their light cage masts and limited main gun elevation could have been gone by 1928. What happened as far as USN capital ship construction in a non-Treaty world would be determined by what Japan did. Basically, Congress would fund building two ships to every Japanese capital ship. Had the Japanese been able to sustain their "8-8-8" program through the No.13 class, then you would have seen those 1918 authorized BBs funded. Essentially, no matter what the Japanese did they could never get above 50% of the USN in an unrestricted environment. The Japanese admirals like Yamamoto knew this and had enough political pull to get the Washington and London Treaties done, but after 1931, they lost the fight to the "Big Navy" faction, who could never admit that maybe the US did have the will to out-build, and if necessary, out-fight the Japanese.
In such an unrestricted scenario, the USN could convert all six "Lexington" class scout cruisers to carriers and still had four 16" super-dreadnoughts to Japan's two and fourteen ultra-dreadnoughts to Japan's seven by 1930. The USN saw naval aviation as a critical component of the future navy. In the FY 1919, 1920 and 1921 construction proposals to Congress, the carriers were the number one priority for construction. The Naval War College, using data from the British and making assumptions on the future of aviation, war gamed Plan "Orange" with and without carriers and came to believe carriers were essential along with capital ship floatplanes. Scouting a/c could find the enemy from farther away. Both the USN and IJN believed in the primacy of the battle line, but both understood the advantage that accrued to the side that could attain and maintain air supremacy over the battle area. This would allow the winning side to lay smoke screens down between the battle lines and the winning side to use aerial spotting to fire over the screen while their opponent remained blinded. Air superiority meant fighters, and fighters by 1922 meant carriers. Carriers could also carry dive bombers, a type developed by the USMC and USN in the mid-1920s, which would ensure air superiority by destroying the other sides' carriers, while torpedo bombers would slow the faster Japanese battle line for the final engagement. If the USN completed the six scout cruisers as carriers, they could put 540 a/c to sea, compared to 200 a/c for the British and 20 a/c for the Japanese. The carriers would be backed up by auxiliary carriers (XCV) converted from passenger liners to a level comparable to the IJN's "Hiyo" and "Junyo". There would also be seaplane tenders supporting squadrons of flying boats operating from advanced bases. By the early 1930s, the USN saw these flying boats also acting as bombers, thus the PBY. USMC and USAAC aviation would garrison these advanced bases. Once subs and cruisers established the blockade of Japan, the Army would seize air bases in China and Korea to support a bombing campaign by the USAAC.
As far as cruisers, there was a proposal to reconstruct at least the last three armored cruisers. They would be station flagships in peacetime, like the Far East, and support the battle line during war. The "Omaha" class cruisers would be completed and then 8" gun cruisers, designs for which the USN had developed before the British "Elizabethans" or the Japanese, based on the need for large cruisers in a Pacific War. The albatross around the USN's neck would be the more than 200 "four pipers", an admittedly obsolete design, which would curtail USN destroyer construction until 1930. If Congress had been more flexible, some of these hulls would have been replaced by 2,200 ton leaders, though the USN probably wouldn't get the 25 or so it needed or completing them to a newer design. Designs for mods were developed for the "four pipers" but in the world of the Treaty and the "Roaring Twenties" and then the Depression the funding never came. As far as submarines, the Navy had a bunch of "S" class so they tried out various cruiser and mine-laying designs until settling on the "Cachalot", the design ancestor of the WW2 fleet boats. There were a couple of projects that would bear fruit in the late '30s that the Navy started in the 1920s. They found "seed" money somewhere to put into land-based electric utilities building high temperature, high pressure boilers and turbines and into diesel-electric motors for locomotives. The Navy also pursued a low level program on electronics that would lead to the test radars of 1937-38. And Ordnance studied heavier shells to extend gun life and accuracy at long ranges, resulting in the 2,240lbs 16" and the 1,500lbs 14" "heavy" shells and later the 4.5 caliber 2,700lbs "super-heavy" shell for the 16" gun.
It would seem to be a simple action on the part of the developer to expand the list of guns given that NWS has this information available to make the game more accurate and realistic.
Royal Navy - The British Empire came out of the Great War with renewed prestige, and with a massive war debt (much of it held by US banks), the promise of social programs that kept the troops and people motivated and a recession as government spending declined. In the fiscal year for 1918, the Naval Estimates exceeded 350,000,000 pounds sterling. For the 1920 Fiscal Year, the estimates were for 157,528,800 pounds, a decrease of over half. In 1923, it was 58,000,000 pounds. Like the aftermath of WW2, the government concentrated on rebuilding the merchant marine, deliberately cancelling warships to open slips and docks for commercial construction. The there were other issues. The planned G3 and N3 classes had hit the limit for British warships in tonnage and length. There were only four building slips for warships (there were two commercial slips for large passenger liners) that could build ships of 45,000 tons and over 825 feet in length. There were only five dry docks in the Empire (six when the KGV dock in Singapore was completed) that could handle such ships. This limitation would remain in existence through WW2 because the massive costs that would be involved in expanding warship construction and infrastructure. In a way, this was a price for Britain being first into the Industrial Age. Machinery was issue as the RN had remained conservative on the issue of steam plants, not adopting small tube boilers until 1918 and rejecting high pressure, high temperature plants when tests on destroyers in 1920-22 were less than successful. Armor plate was not an issue, but Britain was behind the US in adopting welding and developing protective plate that could be welded. They did develop "D" (Ducol) steel for welded construction that could be used as protective plating, but unlike STS, it rated somewhere between mild steel and homogenous/non-cemented armor. As far as guns, there would be no problem producing sufficient 16" and 18" guns, the British already having built and deployed an 18" L/40 gun, but Britain lagged behind the Germans, French and US in developing steel alloy hooped guns that were lighter for their bore size. The worse issues were, first, the over-reaction to the battle cruiser losses at Jutland, that were more the result of improper ammo handling than inherent flaws in British turrets, in more complex anti-flash systems and the inexperience of the British in designing and building three gun turrets. The 16" gun turrets that went on to arm the "Nelson" class still did not generate its theoretical rate of fire even in 1940. What was worse, the British came away from post-war armor and shell trials on ex-SMS Baden convinced that their shells were too heavy and too slow. The 16" Gun Mk.I (L/45) was the result, firing a 8crh, 2,048lbs AP shell at 2,700 fps, ranging to over 40,000 yards at 40 degrees with Mk.I rifling. The long bodied shell and the large charge resulted in increased and unacceptable erosion and a loss of accuracy at long range. New rifling (Mk.II) and de-rating the gun to 2,614 fps reduced range and penetration while improving service life and accuracy to just acceptable levels. The adoption of a heavier 6 crh shell (2,250lbs) would have resolved many of these issues at the cost of probable handling problems with the shorter shell, but the RN could not find the funds for a new shell for two ships until 1937, at which point they had run out of time. These same issues would have plagued the 18" gun Mk.II (L/45) and its three gun turret (it was to fired a 2,837lbs shell at 2,700 fps). While these would be the first British capital ships with an "all or nothing" armor system, had they followed the "Nelson" design, there would have been an "Achilles" heel, a space existing between the top of the sloped internal belt and the main armor deck. Also, the G3, in the opinion of its designer, would probably not make its designed speed. These ships, however, would have a new fire control system, the result of studies of the experience of the Great War. Unfortunately, the retention of DC power and of "step by step" transmission of data between the directors, Admiralty Fire Control Table (AFCT) and turrets would be less efficient than the American system adopted in the "Colorado" class. Still, the G3 class while classed as "battle cruisers" were really "fast battleships". The first four G3 ships were ordered in late 1921 for laying down in 1922, but were suspended during the Washington Treaty Conference. Had they been laid down, they would have been completed in 1926 given available funding and peacetime work schedules. David Brown gives 50-50 odds that they would never have been laid down and completed, given the economic situation in Britain in 1922. Four N3s would have been laid down, if funded, when the G3s were launched and would have completed in 1928, with four more G3s in 1930 and four more N3s in 1932. There would have been limited reconstruction of earlier classes, mainly the rebuilds of "Repulse" and "Renown" and bulging the rest of the "R" class battleships, the deployment of HACS, 4" AA guns and the 2pdr Mk.VIII automatic gun. The RN had the heaviest armed AA batteries on capital ships in the world in the 1930s. Unfortunately, they picked a non-tachymetric AA fire control system, that despite constant modification even into WW2, never equaled the performance of the tachymetric systems adopted by the US and Japan. In the meanwhile, all the 12" gun dreadnoughts, pre-dreadnoughts and armored cruisers were gone, for disposal, sale, disarmed or scrapped. The 13.5" gun super-dreadnoughts would be next, having gone into Reserve between 1922 and 1926, the crews going to new construction. On the other hand, the "E" class cruisers were probably the best light cruisers in the world when completed and the twin turret an excellent design applied to capital ship secondary battery and future cruisers. All cruisers of classes before the "C" classes would have been disposed of, except for the Australian "Town" class. British destroyers were also superior in layout and performance, leading to a number of exports to other navies. In submarines, the initial priority would be large patrol types for a Pacific war. British warship. With the German fleet gone, the only possible enemies were the Japanese and Italians. The British didn't take Mussolini seriously and expected the French Navy to handle the Italians with some assistance. The Japanese, on the other hand, were identified as the main threat in 1919 to Britain's interests in China and her SEA colonies. The war plan went pretty much like "Orange". The Japanese would be successful early, seizing Hong Kong and Shanghai and penetrating the SW Pacific to capture Brunei and its oil. The British, leaving a covering force in European waters would deploy the majority of the fleet to the East, initially on Indian Ocean and Australian ports/bases and eventually Singapore, when it was complete. From there, the British would establish a distant blockade of Japan with subs and cruisers, while moving forward to recapture Hong Kong and other points from which a close blockade and bombing campaign could be conducted. The IJN battle fleet would come out to break the blockade, the British Fleet would meet and defeat it in a "Jutland" some where south of Japan and the blockade and bombing would force the Japanese to admit defeat. The greater aggressiveness of Italy with its conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-36 and the rise of Hitler from 1933, drew more and more of the fleet to the Med and Home waters, putting this strategy in danger as less and less of the Fleet could be deployed to the Indian Ocean. But between 1922-1935, a British intervention with or without US support against Japan's actions in China would have gone this way. It should be noted that time went on, the British tried harder and harder to get the US to take a coordinated response to Japanese aggression. As far as the US, the British were determined to keep the entente that they had developed since 1850 and refused to contemplate a war with the US, despite the occasional Anglophobia of senior USN leaders in the 1920s. As an example, the US was excluded as a possible enemy that the British would confront under the Anglo-Japanese alliance of 1902.
US - Coming out of the Great War, the US was the most powerful industrial nation in the world and had gone from a debtor to holding massive British and French war debt. In 1922, when the British had no capital ships building (and a potential for four every two years from 1926) and the Japanese, four, the US had fifteen. There were six building slips that could build any ships that would fit through a Panama Canal lock and six that could build ships up to 725' long and 40,000 tons, with four more able to build 650' and 35,000 ton capital ships. The US had 560,000 tons of capital ships building when the British had zero and Japan had 166,000. There were six drydocks on the East Coast and two on the West and one at Pearl Harbor (1919) that could hold any ship that would fit through the Panama Canal. Between 1920 and 1922, the US built 32 - 16" L/45 and completed 81 16" L/50 guns with another 43 incomplete. In 1922, the "Tillman" design studies were not fantasy if they ever were. With those six building slips, the US could have laid down and completed six "Tillman IV" design battleships. The USN had an 18" gun half-complete in 1922. It had built 32 triple and three gun turrets. It was producing six of the most powerful warship machinery in history for the "Lexington" class "large scout cruisers" (the USN never designated the "Lexington" class as battle cruisers and did not consider them as such). If there was a fly in the ointment, it was armor plate. While the USN was satisfied it could produce quality homogenous plate at thicknesses up to 18", it was limiting itself to 13.5" thick modified Krupp formula cemented plate as the thickest that US plants could produce at a uniform high quality. On the other hand, the USN developed Special Treatment Steel, a steel that was within 98% effectiveness of Class "B" (homogenous, cemented armor was Class "A") plates and could be welded. More and more welding was being employed, producing lighter and stronger hulls and superstructures. On the commercial side there was the massive Hog Island complex (which was broken up and sold for scrap after the war). As an aside, David Brown asserts that the Washington Treaty saved the USN from being left with inferior ships compared to the British and Japanese. I cannot really see how the "South Dakota" class was inferior to the Japanese ships. She traded speed for protection and firepower. The "Lexington" class were in the eyes of the USN, not intended to engage in prolonged gunnery duels with other capital ships. They were intended to fight through the enemy screen for information and then be able to withdraw and outrun any ships that could defeat them. And there was plenty of time to revise the design. Not one of the class was more than 20% complete in 1922 and the design could have traded 6,000 tons for armor, say a 10" belt at fifteen degrees for 1.5 knots. But the real issue is that Mr. Brown forgets that this wasn't ALL of the US post-war building plan. These ships were authorized and funds appropriated for them in 1916. In 1918, Congress authorized TEN more battleships. The "spring style" designs for these ships between 1919 and 1922 were for the combination of "South Dakota" armor and guns with the "Lexington" machinery. This meant a battleship around 53,000 ton trial displacement, 13.5" belt sloped at 15 degrees, 12 - 16" L/50 Mk.2 guns (4 x 3) and 30 knots at 180,000shp (this plant actually developed over 200,000 shp on trials). Had the naval arms race continued into 1930s, six of these would be laid down in 1923-24 as the "Lexington' class were launched, completing in 1925-26, with the next four completing in 1927-28, at a time when the British would have just completed four N3 and four G3 in 1926, while the Japanese completed Tosa in 1923, Kaga in 1924, Akagi in 1925, Atago in 1926, Takao in 1927 and a replacement Amagi in 1928. The last four could easily have been built to an improved design at 60,000 tons, 27 knots and 12 - 18" L/50 guns, completing in 1928-29.
The problem was that Congress by 1919 had lost interest in a Navy "second to none" and would reduce the Navy's budget from $1,971,645,000 in 1919 to $508,155,000 in 1922 and $330,607,000 in 1923. There were sufficient funds to complete those ships on the stocks, if there were no Treaty. The USN might have converted all six "Lexingtons" to carriers or they might have junked two to get the funds and materiel to upgrade the protection of two ships as they completed the other two as carriers. Certainly all the pre-dreadnoughts, "South Carolina" and "Michigan" were gone as well as all the monitors and all the armored and protected armor cruisers other than the "Big Eight". If the 1916 program was completed, there can be no doubt all the 12" dreadnoughts would have gone and possibly the "New York" and "Texas". Even the unmodified "Pennsylvania" and "New Mexico" classes with their light cage masts and limited main gun elevation could have been gone by 1928. What happened as far as USN capital ship construction in a non-Treaty world would be determined by what Japan did. Basically, Congress would fund building two ships to every Japanese capital ship. Had the Japanese been able to sustain their "8-8-8" program through the No.13 class, then you would have seen those 1918 authorized BBs funded. Essentially, no matter what the Japanese did they could never get above 50% of the USN in an unrestricted environment. The Japanese admirals like Yamamoto knew this and had enough political pull to get the Washington and London Treaties done, but after 1931, they lost the fight to the "Big Navy" faction, who could never admit that maybe the US did have the will to out-build, and if necessary, out-fight the Japanese.
In such an unrestricted scenario, the USN could convert all six "Lexington" class scout cruisers to carriers and still had four 16" super-dreadnoughts to Japan's two and fourteen ultra-dreadnoughts to Japan's seven by 1930. The USN saw naval aviation as a critical component of the future navy. In the FY 1919, 1920 and 1921 construction proposals to Congress, the carriers were the number one priority for construction. The Naval War College, using data from the British and making assumptions on the future of aviation, war gamed Plan "Orange" with and without carriers and came to believe carriers were essential along with capital ship floatplanes. Scouting a/c could find the enemy from farther away. Both the USN and IJN believed in the primacy of the battle line, but both understood the advantage that accrued to the side that could attain and maintain air supremacy over the battle area. This would allow the winning side to lay smoke screens down between the battle lines and the winning side to use aerial spotting to fire over the screen while their opponent remained blinded. Air superiority meant fighters, and fighters by 1922 meant carriers. Carriers could also carry dive bombers, a type developed by the USMC and USN in the mid-1920s, which would ensure air superiority by destroying the other sides' carriers, while torpedo bombers would slow the faster Japanese battle line for the final engagement. If the USN completed the six scout cruisers as carriers, they could put 540 a/c to sea, compared to 200 a/c for the British and 20 a/c for the Japanese. The carriers would be backed up by auxiliary carriers (XCV) converted from passenger liners to a level comparable to the IJN's "Hiyo" and "Junyo". There would also be seaplane tenders supporting squadrons of flying boats operating from advanced bases. By the early 1930s, the USN saw these flying boats also acting as bombers, thus the PBY. USMC and USAAC aviation would garrison these advanced bases. Once subs and cruisers established the blockade of Japan, the Army would seize air bases in China and Korea to support a bombing campaign by the USAAC.
As far as cruisers, there was a proposal to reconstruct at least the last three armored cruisers. They would be station flagships in peacetime, like the Far East, and support the battle line during war. The "Omaha" class cruisers would be completed and then 8" gun cruisers, designs for which the USN had developed before the British "Elizabethans" or the Japanese, based on the need for large cruisers in a Pacific War. The albatross around the USN's neck would be the more than 200 "four pipers", an admittedly obsolete design, which would curtail USN destroyer construction until 1930. If Congress had been more flexible, some of these hulls would have been replaced by 2,200 ton leaders, though the USN probably wouldn't get the 25 or so it needed or completing them to a newer design. Designs for mods were developed for the "four pipers" but in the world of the Treaty and the "Roaring Twenties" and then the Depression the funding never came. As far as submarines, the Navy had a bunch of "S" class so they tried out various cruiser and mine-laying designs until settling on the "Cachalot", the design ancestor of the WW2 fleet boats. There were a couple of projects that would bear fruit in the late '30s that the Navy started in the 1920s. They found "seed" money somewhere to put into land-based electric utilities building high temperature, high pressure boilers and turbines and into diesel-electric motors for locomotives. The Navy also pursued a low level program on electronics that would lead to the test radars of 1937-38. And Ordnance studied heavier shells to extend gun life and accuracy at long ranges, resulting in the 2,240lbs 16" and the 1,500lbs 14" "heavy" shells and later the 4.5 caliber 2,700lbs "super-heavy" shell for the 16" gun.
It would seem to be a simple action on the part of the developer to expand the list of guns given that NWS has this information available to make the game more accurate and realistic.