Another part of the problem for the RN BC's was the poor quality of British ammunition. If you're going to have them as a striking force, it would be nice to supply them with some decent stuff, to actually hit home initially........... and provide them with superior gun direction/optics........... especially as they had the advantage of the 13.5", a very good, reliable gun.

Actually, Fisher's original concept was to abolish battleships totally:

This review says it all, from Amazon:

"In "Sir John Fisher's Naval Revolution" Nicholas Lambert has provided a comprehensive analysis of the policies of Admiral Sir John Fisher and the Royal Navy in the ten years before the outbreak of World War One.
Lambert makes it clear that Fisher was not appointed First Sea Lord in 1904 to introduce the dreadnought battleship/battlecruiser but to cut naval spending. This fact spurred Fisher to introduce new technologies to maintain Britain's naval supremacy when that supremacy was increasingly under threat from a number of quarters. Lambert puts emphasis on Fisher's ideas about the use of flotilla craft. These were small submersible boats and surface craft armed with torpedoes that could close the narrow seas around the British Isles to enemy battle fleets thus freeing the British fleet to roam the high seas, bringing battle to the enemy and protecting her own huge ocean trade. Lambert shows how on the eve of the war, the Royal Navy was on the verge of stopping battleship construction altogether on favor of flotilla craft. This is new ground."

The whole point of BCs was act as cruiser-killers on a global basis, protecting the Imperial trade-routes. Home defence was to be the responsibility of torpedo-boats and submarines, not battleships....Fisher never liked them. His favourite ship when a sea captain/admiral was the Renown...a light. fast (for the time) battleship.

Here's the same thing on wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Fisher,_1st_Baron_Fisher

" Fisher's policy with regards to Dreadnoughts has often been misunderstood; it was not a class of ship which he favoured, as his time as admiral of the Mediterranean fleet had taught him the vulnerability of slow big gun ships to mines, torpedoes and submarines. He wanted battlecruisers to defend Britain’s colonies, and a large fleet of small ships to defend the British Isles. However, when his plans for battlecruisers met with opposition from within the service, he was forced to compromise. "

So the BCs were, from the time Fisher's concept was hi-jacked, forced into a role never intended.

Re the Hood...her protection was actually as good as the Queen Elizabeths and the cause of her sinking is still uncertain today. It is suspected however that a fire in a secondary battery caused by 8 inch shell from the Prinz Eugen flashed to a magazine and caused the explosion.

As a point of interest, exactly the same thing happened to make the Yamato explode...

wiki again:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_battleship_Yamato

"The first two bombs dropped by Lt. Commander Wood hit on the starboard side of the weather deck, knocking out several of the 25 mm machine guns and the high-angle gun turret and ripping a hole in the flying deck. Seconds later came the two bombs from Lt. (jg) Ferry, destroying secondary battery fire control station as they blew through the flying deck and starting a fire, which was never extinguished. This fire continued to spread and is believed to have caused the explosion of the main ammunition magazine as the Yamato capsized some two hours later. Hot on Ferry's tail was Lt. (jg) Sieber, delivering two bomb hits forward of the island, ripping more holes in the decks in the vicinity of the number three main gun turret.

The torpedo plane pilots were ordered to aim for the unarmoured parts of the Yamato's hull; the bow and stern. They were also told to only attack her on one side, so that she would capsize. Within minutes of the Helldivers' bombing, the Yamato suffered three torpedo hits to her port side and began listing.

Over the next two hours, two more attacks would be launched, pounding the Yamato with torpedoes and bombs. Attempts of counter-flooding failed, and shortly after 1400 hours, the commanding officer gave the word to prepare to abandon ship. As the ship listed beyond a 90-degree angle and began sinking, a gigantic explosion of the stern ammunition magazines tore the ship apart. The huge mushroom of fire and smoke exploded almost four miles into the air and the fire was seen by sentries 125 miles away in Kagoshima prefecture on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands."

"The senior surviving bridge officer Mitsuru Yoshida claims that a fire alert for the magazine of the forward superfiring 155 mm guns was observed as the ship sank. This fire appears to have detonated the shell propellant stored as the ship rolled over, which in turn set off the magazine in turret 'B' resulting in the famous pictures of the actual explosion and subsequent smoke column photographed by US aircraft (shown above and recorded as being seen in southern Japan, one hundred miles away).

The bow section landed upright, with the stern section remaining keel up. The three main turrets fell away as the ship turned turtle and landed in the wreckage field around the separated hull pieces.

A further large hole was found in the stern section, strongly suggesting that a third magazine explosion occurred, possibly the aft 155 mm gun magazine.

Further examples of capital ships being lost due to magazine detonations of this nature during or after battle are the British battlecruisers HMS Queen Mary, Invincible and Indefatigable at the battle of Jutland in 1916, Hood at battle of the Denmark Strait in 1941, USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1941 and HMS Barham in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1941."

Well, in part, the German BCs sacrificed firepower to achieve superior speed; the British gave up armor (the whole "if you move fast enough you won't get hit" mentality that plague Japanese aircraft design in the 1930s and early 40s).

But man, don't those WWI battlewagons look great? While Distant Guns was an excellent game, it was a little hard to get excited about "battleships" with 4x10" guns . . . Bring on the 15 inchers!

Agreed. I really really really hope they do a War Plan Orange game after this.

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I agree, I am jazzed about a Dreadnought type of game with this engine.

At the same time I would have loved a Spanish American War era game as well. I can imagine the Great White Fleet against the Royal Navy or even the Imperial Japanese Navy.

There are a lot of what ifs that could be made with the engine. Matrix has an excellent game based upon their War in the Pacific Engine called War Plan Orange. It basically covered a hypothetical war between Japan and the US in the 1920, when the Battlewagon was the true queen of the seas. In it the Lexington class ships were made as battlecruisers and the Kaga and Akagi class were BBs and BCs repectively.

I would love to see something like this with the Distant Guns engine. This definately has the makings to be the new Fighting Steel, with the focus much more than WW2.

You'd lose against the 1904 Royal Navy Tom.

I don't know, the US fleet in 1904 was pretty strong. Granted it wasn't the Royal Navy but it wasn't any slouch. The US had 12 BBs in commission by 1904 (13 if you count the Texas).

The Royal Navy had 22 but several of them were over 10 years old.

It might have been an interesting battle.

Sorry, but in 1904, the RN had far more battleships than 22. Granted, part of the total might have been in reserve, but if you're going to include Texas in the US line of battle, the numbers would be far more skewed in the RN's favour. Texas was little more than an armoured ship with a couple of big guns.

RN battlefleet 1904:

2 Swiftsures
2 Queens
3 Londons
3 Formidables
6 Duncans
6 Canopus
9 Majestics
7 Royal Sovereigns
1 Hood
2 Trafalgars
2 Barfleurs
1 Renown

Total 44, oldest built in 1895.

US Battlefleet:

2 Louisianas
5 New Jerseys
2 Idahos
3 Maines
3 Alabamas
2 Kearsages
1 Iowa
3 Massachusetts

Total 21 oldest built in 1893...Texas excluded only 6,300 tonnes, a coast defence ship. Also excluded a few old RN clunkers like Edinburgh and Colussus.

Now to armoured cruisers.........

I was talking about relatively modern, blue water warships less than five years old. Some of the battleships that Mad Max listed in both fleets were past their prime. If Tsushima told us anything it told us that outdated warships can be a much greater liability to modern warships. The Russians, on paper, had a BB advantage. In modern warships it was much closer.

The Brits still had a 2:1 advantage in modern warships. Five years doesn't seem like much today but during this timeframe five years was a lifetime. Warships design advanced at a speed that was not matched before or afterward. Interestingly, these warships, modern in 1904, were outdated only a couple years later.

You are right about cruisers, the Brits had a distinct advantage. Then again, the British had a lot more area they had to defend. The US, had only a few posessions to protect. The Brits would win but it would be a much better battle. In 1904 the United STates was the only country that could even come close to Great Britain in seapower. And they were a fairly distant second.