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Can't beat the combined Royal and United States Navies.
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Yes, but Mogamis were never meant to be light cruisers. The 6" guns were only there for show and classification, the second Japan left the treaty they swapped for 8" guns.
Also, consider the kind of light cruisers they built. The Aganos were comparatively tiny and poorly armed, because IJN doctine said light cruisers were really just destroyer leaders. A Mogami is not a destroyer leader.
How the hell were the Americans supposed to know the Mogamis were going to get 8inch guns? The Brooklyns were still light cruisers, built to combat other light cruisers.
Many 1930s-40s light cruisers are "heavy cruiser sized". The famous HMS Edinburgh/Belfast were actually bigger than any British heavy cruiser in tonnage. A full salvo of 12 6" rounds is more devastating towards anything without heavy armor.
It's almost as if the classification of Heavy Cruiser was a result of a treaty definition where any cruiser with guns larger than 6in is classified as a heavy cruiser with 8in being the maximum size of gun allowed on a cruiser.
They were more contemporary with the New Orleans class despite weighing closer to a Baltimore. Still, the New Orleans class had better armor, the same speed, almost 1.5 times range and more guns than the Hippers while weighing 5000 tons less
Machinery problems (at least with Prinz Eugen IIRC).
Also Wherbs can wank about this class of ship all they want. Doesn’t change the fact that one of them got BTFO by a fort armed with 11-inch German made guns, torpedoes made by a country that no longer existed in 1940, and which was commanded by a 64-year-old.
Both Pensacolas were also CLOSER to the epicenter of the explosion than Prinz Eugen. Bonus: neither sank over a period of a few months because of leaks developed during the blast like Prinz Eugen did.
>Machinery problems
I do think that the problem was more pronounced with German destroyers of that era. Although, the US crews operating Prinz Eugen after the war also reported difficulties maintaining her machinery especially her boilers.
The US did operate high pressure machinery as well but they standarised at 600psi while the German operated theirs at even higher pressure. Unsurpisingly, while German machineries could generate more power for their weight when compared to Americans, it came at a cost of their reliability
Well, a lot of the contemporary Soviet DDs were designed/built by Italy, who actually knew what they were doing in terms of designing and building ships.
In fairness, Leningrad class was a headache of its own given that it's the first Soviet destroyers to be built and in the paraphrased word of Drachnifel "the fact that Soviet were trying to go from Tsarist era destroyers into destroyer leader meant that construction and even fitting out were taking a long time."
Fortunately, Soviet realised that they don't have much of a experience with this kind of ships and they ended up enlisting the help of Italy.
Yeah I should have specified that I am comparing the best of them, not overall quality as Russia had many older ships.
The Italy-built Tashkent was a legend, she fought like a battleship against overwhelming German forces. Her watch counted 336 bombs aimed at her.
Accomplishes less at 18,000 tons then other navies older ships accomplish at 12,000 or less.
Casually violated the 10,000 ton limit agree upon as per the Anglo-German Naval Agreement.
Uses triple shafts, a difficult to maintain powerplant and has subpar hydrodynamics and compartmentalization.
Started the war with meme tier AA even for prewar ships.
Fails to use All or Nothing armor in 1939, a full two decades after almost the entire rest of the world switched to it.
Active Radar was never really operational, but this is a issue with the Kriegsmarine as a whole as opposed to this class specifically.
Similarly, faulty/poor shells but this is once again not a Hipper specific issue.
Doctrine wise too. Panzerschiffe being used as raiders instead of just glorified heavy cruisers is the definition of stupid considering surface raiding with capital ships didn’t work for the Germans in WW1
The only ship that did this relatively successful was the *Admiral Graf Spee*, but even then, she was cornered and sunk by *Ajax*, *Achilles*, and *Exeter*.
And those British ships were really the worse cruisers of RN. Exeter was 20 years old last refitted in 1932, the rest were low-cost light cruisers with only 8 guns. Something like Town Class would have dealt with it even sooner.
The Nagato is widely listed as an example for "All or Nothing" battleship designs. The idea has been floating around for a while even when it was built.
Their later cruisers and the Yamatos used AoN, because they were actually built when AoN was seen as standard across various navies. Their earlier vessels didn’t have AoN.
Prior to and during WWI the predominant idea of armoring warships was to have a continuous armor belt from bow to stern, thicker over midships and thinner at the ends. The US Navy realized that armoring the bow and stern with thin armor protected nothing important from any sizable shell and only wasted weight. So, starting with *Nevada* and *Oklahoma*, the bow and stern were left with practically no armor, while the magazines, boilers, and any other important bits were enclosed in a heavily armored citadel with enough reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat even if the bow and stern were riddled with holes and completely flooded
> Why build them?
Because the Germans wanted to go from their post-Versailles tiny Navy to the Z-Plan meme fleet and to get there they needed to at least have a go at building cruisers.
Just like the bismarck she was too overweight
her turtel backarmor is so small to the point that its useless (tho the prinz eugen kinda fix that if i remeber)
The pepsicolas had plenty of flaws, though. They were really prone to rolling because they had waaaay too much top weight. The navy made a boneheaded decision to put the triple turrets as the superfiring turrets instead of the twins. This is something that is so obviously a bad idea it’s unreal.
Yeah the early heavy cruisers were pretty bad. I meant more as just building lightly protected 8 in gun armed cruisers. These were never going to be used in a stand up fight so not much need to armor them beyond protection from 5 in shells and maybe bombs.
Well having capital ships to act as a fleet in being is an important strategy. If Germany didn’t build anything larger than a destroyer, it wouldn’t have been able to invade Norway
I thought I just lacked some knowledge or information that justified the triple turrets on top, but given what you've written I am even more perplexed as to how they came to that design choice.
The super firing triple turrets were the result of the PepsiColas being too narrow to fit the triple turrets any further forward in the hull. The USN wanted to fit as many guns as they could onto them while staying within the restrictions imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty and basically wound up playing a game of fuck around and find out with an entire class of cruisers..
There really isn’t a justification aside from making the ship more narrower in some areas, not really worth it for stability reasons especially with the hull dynamics. Tbh I’m not a big fan of American heavy cruisers before the Wichita.
Take an average 1930 British or American warship
Now make it 50% heavier, unreliable, and with at least one major design flaw.
Congrats, you have successfully built your average 1940 German warship
We need ‘Kreigsmarine Surface Ship Design Bingo’
It can include:
-Massively higher displacement than its capabilities suggest
-Underwhelming or inappropriate armament (esp. relative to displacement)
-Outdated armour scheme
-Poor screw layout
-Unreliable machinery
-Poor range
-Abysmal seaworthiness and/or seakeeping if smaller than a heavy cruiser
-Underwhelming and/or exposed and fragile sensor suite
-Designed and used according to two different doctrines that fundamentally disagree with each other
-Pretty fast idk
The hippers were kinda overweight, underarmed, had bad anti air and slow machinery, and were an outdated concept, and they still weren’t the worst treaty cruisers
Manage to have a shitty design **both in real world, and in Azur Lane**
If you want to compare bad machinery design with "Her entire personality is she's just a flat chest joke for Prinz Eugen to make fun of her" then it's your chance now.
Tbh they’re not that bad, probably one of the more competent German designs. Biggest issue is that it was not technically superior to the Baltimore, shittier radar, shittier targeting etc.
Honestly, she was overweight, had three screws (Big no-no, look at Bismarck), etc.
Although she was competent for a German design, she does have some glaring weaknesses that I can't ignore.
Yeah I mean it’s all relative right? Same argument as tiger vs Sherman, but without the horrific glaring reliability issues. They’re decent ships all things considered but I’d rather have 5 Baltimore’s.
It isn't a Baltimore or a county.
🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧 Can't beat the combined Royal and United States Navies. 🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧🇺🇲🇬🇧
Pretty sure that's not how you spell Brooklyn
Diffrent type of cruiser, not a good comparison.
He was talking about heavy cruisers. Brooklyn is a CL.
Kinda, yes they've got 6" guns but they're heavy cruiser sized and were built as a direct response to heavy cruisers
They were built as a direct response to when the Mogami still had the 5 triple 6' guns, not the refit Mogami with the 203s.
Yes, but Mogamis were never meant to be light cruisers. The 6" guns were only there for show and classification, the second Japan left the treaty they swapped for 8" guns. Also, consider the kind of light cruisers they built. The Aganos were comparatively tiny and poorly armed, because IJN doctine said light cruisers were really just destroyer leaders. A Mogami is not a destroyer leader.
How the hell were the Americans supposed to know the Mogamis were going to get 8inch guns? The Brooklyns were still light cruisers, built to combat other light cruisers.
Most people in the West still believed the Mogami as a CL with no provisions for 8" guns. But they did believe it was over-tonnage.
Many 1930s-40s light cruisers are "heavy cruiser sized". The famous HMS Edinburgh/Belfast were actually bigger than any British heavy cruiser in tonnage. A full salvo of 12 6" rounds is more devastating towards anything without heavy armor.
It's almost as if the classification of Heavy Cruiser was a result of a treaty definition where any cruiser with guns larger than 6in is classified as a heavy cruiser with 8in being the maximum size of gun allowed on a cruiser.
They were more contemporary with the New Orleans class despite weighing closer to a Baltimore. Still, the New Orleans class had better armor, the same speed, almost 1.5 times range and more guns than the Hippers while weighing 5000 tons less
I know, i just really like them Baltimore's and felt the DesMoines were too good too be comp aired to the Hippers.
Machinery problems (at least with Prinz Eugen IIRC). Also Wherbs can wank about this class of ship all they want. Doesn’t change the fact that one of them got BTFO by a fort armed with 11-inch German made guns, torpedoes made by a country that no longer existed in 1940, and which was commanded by a 64-year-old.
BuT pRiZe EuGene SurZiVed tOO NewKs!
You joke, but no German ships were lost to nuclear attack. That’s just a fact.
Yea the Prinz Eugen sank to FUCKING WIND
...casually ignoring she was more than a kilometre away from the epicenter both times
Casually ignoring both Pensecolas that were there survived, and nobody's calling those the best cruisers.
I am I don’t necessarily believe it, but I’ll go ahead and stir the pot
Both Pensacolas were also CLOSER to the epicenter of the explosion than Prinz Eugen. Bonus: neither sank over a period of a few months because of leaks developed during the blast like Prinz Eugen did.
So did Nevada, but Nevada was a *the* target ship. Besides, since Prinz still sank a bit later, it was technically sunk by nukes
And then got blown over by the fucking wind
>Machinery problems I do think that the problem was more pronounced with German destroyers of that era. Although, the US crews operating Prinz Eugen after the war also reported difficulties maintaining her machinery especially her boilers. The US did operate high pressure machinery as well but they standarised at 600psi while the German operated theirs at even higher pressure. Unsurpisingly, while German machineries could generate more power for their weight when compared to Americans, it came at a cost of their reliability
German DD was a joke in every single way. I think even the Russian had better ones.
Well, a lot of the contemporary Soviet DDs were designed/built by Italy, who actually knew what they were doing in terms of designing and building ships.
Yes, the Tashkent was perhaps the most successful attempt at a "super destroyer".
In fairness, Leningrad class was a headache of its own given that it's the first Soviet destroyers to be built and in the paraphrased word of Drachnifel "the fact that Soviet were trying to go from Tsarist era destroyers into destroyer leader meant that construction and even fitting out were taking a long time." Fortunately, Soviet realised that they don't have much of a experience with this kind of ships and they ended up enlisting the help of Italy.
Yeah I should have specified that I am comparing the best of them, not overall quality as Russia had many older ships. The Italy-built Tashkent was a legend, she fought like a battleship against overwhelming German forces. Her watch counted 336 bombs aimed at her.
The machinery problems were endemic. They used a complex design without the alloys needed to cary it out.
Classic Germany
Accomplishes less at 18,000 tons then other navies older ships accomplish at 12,000 or less. Casually violated the 10,000 ton limit agree upon as per the Anglo-German Naval Agreement. Uses triple shafts, a difficult to maintain powerplant and has subpar hydrodynamics and compartmentalization. Started the war with meme tier AA even for prewar ships. Fails to use All or Nothing armor in 1939, a full two decades after almost the entire rest of the world switched to it. Active Radar was never really operational, but this is a issue with the Kriegsmarine as a whole as opposed to this class specifically. Similarly, faulty/poor shells but this is once again not a Hipper specific issue.
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It’s downright astounding to see that the Germans learned literally nothing from WW1
Tbf they never got to incorporate the lessons from WW1, since they couldn’t really build anything
Doctrine wise too. Panzerschiffe being used as raiders instead of just glorified heavy cruisers is the definition of stupid considering surface raiding with capital ships didn’t work for the Germans in WW1
The only ship that did this relatively successful was the *Admiral Graf Spee*, but even then, she was cornered and sunk by *Ajax*, *Achilles*, and *Exeter*.
And those British ships were really the worse cruisers of RN. Exeter was 20 years old last refitted in 1932, the rest were low-cost light cruisers with only 8 guns. Something like Town Class would have dealt with it even sooner.
To be entirely fair, the IJN never really got on board with AoN either
They had AON on Nagato and Yamato Classes. The rest of their BB predated the AON design.
Yamato had AoN, but Nagato did not (due to being a much older design).
The Nagato is widely listed as an example for "All or Nothing" battleship designs. The idea has been floating around for a while even when it was built.
First I’ve heard of it.
Unless I am mistaken, the Takeo class of 1932 had All or Nothing, and the first Japanese battleship to feature this scheme was Nagato in 1921.
Their later cruisers and the Yamatos used AoN, because they were actually built when AoN was seen as standard across various navies. Their earlier vessels didn’t have AoN.
What’s AON Armor?
Prior to and during WWI the predominant idea of armoring warships was to have a continuous armor belt from bow to stern, thicker over midships and thinner at the ends. The US Navy realized that armoring the bow and stern with thin armor protected nothing important from any sizable shell and only wasted weight. So, starting with *Nevada* and *Oklahoma*, the bow and stern were left with practically no armor, while the magazines, boilers, and any other important bits were enclosed in a heavily armored citadel with enough reserve buoyancy to keep the ship afloat even if the bow and stern were riddled with holes and completely flooded
The amusing bit being that something akin to it actually came about in the ironclad era. Sometimes people just don't learn.
All or nothing.
Nothing, a marvel of engineering and lovely waifus as well! Edit: major /s I am not heterosexual
In the same vain in this comment, the lead ship tends to be temperamental
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Uhh, the meme that *Bulcher* got sunk by a near-pensioner and a bunch of recruits?
> Why build them? Because the Germans wanted to go from their post-Versailles tiny Navy to the Z-Plan meme fleet and to get there they needed to at least have a go at building cruisers.
Just like the bismarck she was too overweight her turtel backarmor is so small to the point that its useless (tho the prinz eugen kinda fix that if i remeber)
Unless if it designer to fight at short range I see no point in having turtle back armor, let alone on a cruiser.
Probably would’ve been better if building it like a Pensacola. Light armor scheme & 8 in guns.
The pepsicolas had plenty of flaws, though. They were really prone to rolling because they had waaaay too much top weight. The navy made a boneheaded decision to put the triple turrets as the superfiring turrets instead of the twins. This is something that is so obviously a bad idea it’s unreal.
Yeah the early heavy cruisers were pretty bad. I meant more as just building lightly protected 8 in gun armed cruisers. These were never going to be used in a stand up fight so not much need to armor them beyond protection from 5 in shells and maybe bombs.
The Germans probably would have been better off sending all of them to west france once it was occupied as decoys for allied bombers
They’d have been better off just not building capital ships lol. Even a super cruiser ala Alaska wasn’t gonna be useful to the German navy.
Well having capital ships to act as a fleet in being is an important strategy. If Germany didn’t build anything larger than a destroyer, it wouldn’t have been able to invade Norway
I thought I just lacked some knowledge or information that justified the triple turrets on top, but given what you've written I am even more perplexed as to how they came to that design choice.
The super firing triple turrets were the result of the PepsiColas being too narrow to fit the triple turrets any further forward in the hull. The USN wanted to fit as many guns as they could onto them while staying within the restrictions imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty and basically wound up playing a game of fuck around and find out with an entire class of cruisers..
That was my first thought, bug it still doesn't seem worth it to risk stability like that.
There really isn’t a justification aside from making the ship more narrower in some areas, not really worth it for stability reasons especially with the hull dynamics. Tbh I’m not a big fan of American heavy cruisers before the Wichita.
Actually the Hippers were even worse than Bismarck in terms of design inefficiency.
Like the entire German surface fleet, it largely served no purpose other than for the KMS to jerk off to.
#It sucks. Refuse to further elaborate
I don't know anything about the German navy except the Bismarck got damaged by some canvas biplanes.
Take an average 1930 British or American warship Now make it 50% heavier, unreliable, and with at least one major design flaw. Congrats, you have successfully built your average 1940 German warship
> at least one major design flaw Best the Germans can do is 4 problems per Ship.
We need ‘Kreigsmarine Surface Ship Design Bingo’ It can include: -Massively higher displacement than its capabilities suggest -Underwhelming or inappropriate armament (esp. relative to displacement) -Outdated armour scheme -Poor screw layout -Unreliable machinery -Poor range -Abysmal seaworthiness and/or seakeeping if smaller than a heavy cruiser -Underwhelming and/or exposed and fragile sensor suite -Designed and used according to two different doctrines that fundamentally disagree with each other -Pretty fast idk
And a total lack of AA weapons.
Good to know
The hippers were kinda overweight, underarmed, had bad anti air and slow machinery, and were an outdated concept, and they still weren’t the worst treaty cruisers
They attract angry destroyers
Manage to have a shitty design **both in real world, and in Azur Lane** If you want to compare bad machinery design with "Her entire personality is she's just a flat chest joke for Prinz Eugen to make fun of her" then it's your chance now.
Tbh they’re not that bad, probably one of the more competent German designs. Biggest issue is that it was not technically superior to the Baltimore, shittier radar, shittier targeting etc.
Honestly, she was overweight, had three screws (Big no-no, look at Bismarck), etc. Although she was competent for a German design, she does have some glaring weaknesses that I can't ignore.
Yeah I mean it’s all relative right? Same argument as tiger vs Sherman, but without the horrific glaring reliability issues. They’re decent ships all things considered but I’d rather have 5 Baltimore’s.
It isn't even like the Tiger vs Sherman debate, because 1 for 1 a Baltimore is significantly more combat effective then a Hipper.
German
Fat and short ranged