Project B64 (Amagi Battlecruiser)

[Azumazi]

The Amagi Class Battlecruisers

 

Project B64 was a ship project that when brought into the forebear as the Amagi Class, as a best way of putting it, a child never let to reach her full potential. Due to the Washington Naval Treaty the only keel laid down had to be converted into a CV.

 

The ships themselves went through quite a few development steps. Going over the Tokyo Archives, I've found at least 3 different blueprints, one of which has the unique Bent funnel design as a 1920 refit.

 

The Amagi class was to be part of the 8-8 Plan of 8 battlecruisers and 8 battleships. The battlecruisers to be used as a screening force after the battlelines engaged and to use their heavy fire power to rain hell on the enemy line ships as they pushed through and were to engage the cruisers/dd's with their on fleet force in support. The B64 project was brought up shorting after the battle of jutland as a progress of the Kongo series of ships. Since the Americans had just released their own 14'' gun ship nearly minutes after the launch of Kongo and just a few years later the production of Hood, the Japanese felt they needed to take it a step further. With the Nagato they had the first battleship with 16.1 inch guns. They saw to further this by putting the same guns on their battlecruisers to give them one hell of a punch. Her other main feature to mention was unlike ships of the past having a limited -5/+20 angle, she was to have a -5/+30 angle elevation in her turrets, giving her a good range for the time she was to be produced.

 

She did have one poorly designed feature, her armor. After going through the archives I found series issues in her armor design. The armor layout is nearly designed for belt hits only on a flat path with very little of it below the water line, and even worse, her magazines are very much exposed on the sides under the hull (Serious issue with torpedos). She also has a gap from her Belt to the citadel, that would allow a 33 deg down shell to hit her 2.5 angled secondary armor and punch right through directly into the boiler room. It seems that she was more or less designed with the idea of move in fast, get in flat range, and pound the enemy or hope that the battle line would be to far engaged with the battleships to redirect fire into the battlecruisers leaving the armor to protect vs cruisers and below.

 

The last blueprint shows they went away from the torpedo net idea and went into a solid bulkhead design that's reinforced (like the American standard that was developed), this at least protects the magazines from a torpedo in the rear that was previously exposed.

 

So using what data I could find I designed an Amagi as she would have looked before her funnel redesign using two concepts of the Nagato and Kongo along with a follow up already created on the warship projects board.

 

You will have to click it to expland it to see it at its full size (it is rather large in size)

 

 

As you can see she follows quite a bit of her former sister Kongo in style with her case mate guns, which I might add is 16 of them, 8 on each side of 5.5 inch 50 cal. She also has 8 4.7mm L45's in the last blueprint I saw of her. It progressively went up from 4, to 6, to 8 over the 4 different blueprints (to be fair one was really faded and it could have still been 4 on it) but they were always in 4 different spaced out locations around the funnels on each side.

 

As for torpedo tubes, they were to be forward of Turret A, with 4 tubes each side, Only problem is I had a hard time telling if they were to fire forward (like the older version of torpedo destroyers) or to the side so I left them out of the design.

 

I hope you enjoy it :)

[Azumazi]

Reserved for armor layouts

 

 

These here are the initial numbers done for the B64, you will notice they penciled them in next to the B62 on the page haha.

 

 

I'll see about doing a cleaner view of the armor layout at the very least in a cut away when I get a chance soon.

 

First armor layout (Could be revised later if I find in later designs B64 had armor on her top decks.

[AceF]

Oh sexy ship, looks fast.

 

Not a fan of case mate guns, but I would suspect if built, they would be switched to turrets before WW2 broke out..

 

But 10 16 inch guns, would hurt as hell atleast

[mr3awsome]

One fine ship. Can't wait to play them in game

[Elouda]

Actually, two keels, Amagi and Akagi, were laid down. The original plan following the WNT was to convert both to carriers - however, during the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, Amagis hull was damaged so much that it was scrapped and the incomplete hull of Kaga (the second of the Tosa class battleships) was used for conversion instead.

 

I think had they survived to be built as battlecruisers, the funnels would have been trunked together like in Nagato.

[igorfc]

Sorry for the off-topic question, but how did you designed this vessel? did you used some kind of program or something?

 

Great work BTW +1

[BladedPheonix]

AceF, on 20 February 2013 - 12:20 PM, said:

Oh sexy ship, looks fast.

Not a fan of case mate guns, but I would suspect if built, they would be switched to turrets before WW2 broke out..

But 10 16 inch guns, would hurt as hell atleast

Well they would have probly the strongest ships," if they were completed", during thier time, excluding I think Nagato which had 8x16 inch guns for it's main battery, I wouldnt be surpised if Wargaming added a few "what if" models or configerations to World of Warships, either way I'm lookign forward to posibly playing one of germany's later "H" ,"O", "K" and "L" classes of the Plan Z fleet that was never completed when WW2 broke out. From what I've read these ship posibly had 19- 22 inch guns in 5 turents of either twin or tripple moutings.  :Smile_glasses:
Move over Yamato! Make room for the Kaiser II class! :Smile_playing:

[BladedPheonix]

igorfc, on 20 February 2013 - 05:50 PM, said:

Sorry for the off-topic question, but how did you designed this vessel? did you used some kind of program or something?

Great work BTW +1

He/She probly found them on wikipeida or photobucket, they have tons of info and pictures on warships. :Smile_bajan2:  My guess is the image got squished when posted because the ships was a lot longer, if they did draw it they did a realy good job.

[Wunderwaffen1945]

Looking fat  :Smile_trollface:

[Azumazi]

To explain a few things

 

1. The image looks fat because you have to click the image to have the forum expand it out to view it as a link, it condenses it since I didn't upload it with a thumbnail, and I left it at full size to allow people to save the image for their own viewing.

 

2. No I didn't find this image any where, I had to create it using a base line of the Kongo and Nagato. In that effect only 40% of the hull was already made in the image and the conning tower was designed around the Kongo's redesigned version. Basically Igor, I used photoshop and paint pro to take two images, find the parts that looked very much alike to Amagi, used those parts (To drasically save time) and designed the rest from scratch. Only about 30-40% of the vessel was designed by my hands. This allowed me to get an image up of it within 4-5 hours and not it taking me a week to design it from the bottom up.

 

Elou, yeah I can't believe I forgot to mention Akagi and th earthquake. irony has it I had it in my original notes and some how completely skipped over that when typing up the post. Probably since I was also having an issue getting the damn image to want to post in due to for some reason the forum telling me "we do not support that image extension" on a jpeg.... :Smile_izmena:

[anonym_s4TCbLNuhWyC]

Amazing Looking ship but i find the AA to be a bit weak

[Azumazi]

Yeah that's for sure, but to be fair she was a 1920s design when they still had biplanes about and all that haha.

 

I do have to admit I am curious to how the would have been modernized though if she had been built. Also, this weekend I'll post up the single funnel design that was in the works for her as well.

[Elouda]

Azumazi, on 21 February 2013 - 12:28 AM, said:

Yeah that's for sure, but to be fair she was a 1920s design when they still had biplanes about and all that haha.

I do have to admit I am curious to how the would have been modernized though if she had been built. Also, this weekend I'll post up the single funnel design that was in the works for her as well.

My guess would be a slightly less complete rebuild than on Nagato/Mutsu. Funnels would get trunked, new boilers installed, might loose a couple of 5.5in casemates, and probably gain 6 twin 5in/40s for AA. Later in the war I could see up to perhaps 10 twin 5in/40s installed. She would likely have served like the Kongos did as an escort to the carrier fleet due to her speed.

[Gigaton]

Azumazi, on 20 February 2013 - 11:32 AM, said:

The armor layout is nearly designed for belt hits only on a flat path with very little of it below the water line,

This isn't unusual at all in this period though. The kind of full length underwater belts you see on later Japanese construction (and on SoDak and Iowa) are rather unusual even later on. Some later battleship did have very deep regular belt though (eg. KGV). In WW2 context this is certainly a disadvantage to Amagi of course, but applies to other old battlewagons as well. In pre-WW1 and even WW1 combat ranges shells tend to ricochet off the water, rather than penetrate to depth.

But around WW1 and before, too deep belt below waterline (more than required to keep the unarmoured bottom from being exposed due to rolling) was more of an unfortunate accident than anything else. It could be pretty critical flaw particularily in the late Ironclad early Pre-Dreadnought periods when belts were very shallow and thick (due to inferior armour materials of the day), as submersion of the belt could result in very serious lack of armoured freeboard.

Azumazi, on 20 February 2013 - 11:32 AM, said:

and even worse, her magazines are very much exposed on the sides under the hull (Serious issue with torpedos).

Shell rooms above magazines does protect the latter better vs. gunnery. Royal Navy also adopted this arrangement for their post WW1 battleships.

Azumazi, on 20 February 2013 - 11:32 AM, said:

She also has a gap from her Belt to the citadel, that would allow a 33 deg down shell to hit her 2.5 angled secondary armor and punch right through directly into the boiler room.

I can't seem to find this one. The main deck is the main armoured deck level on these ships, and it's connected with the belt throughout the length of the citadel as far as I can see.

(Edit) Or do you mean the boiler uptakes?

-----

For general comparsion, HMS Hood versus Amagi (I was somewhat amused to find Hood's cross section at the Hiraga Archive):

Hood



Amagi (the" LWL" for load waterline is my paint-fu addition, in case it isn't obvious)

[Azumazi]

I do have to admit I am quite shocked as well at the Hood part being in the Archive. Well, to be fair they did share a lot of technology with each other so I guess it isn't that shocking.

[Azumazi]

I thought I would add up shipbuckets concept of what the Amagi would look like, especially considering I never saw their version and to be fair never ran across the site before now.

 

 

Kinda scary just how close we were in design (including the spot lights near the funnels!)  :Smile_veryhappy:  although to be fair I never did find a number of how many they would have actually carried, but figured if she was going to go out in a night raid she would need them.

[Elouda]

Another good (in my opinion) drawing of a BC Amagi, in both 'as-built' and 'modernised' versions;

 

This drawing is only of many awesome ones from Wolf's Shipyard.

[Robert9670]

If you guys ever read science fiction, the Amagi (in her battlecruiser form) is present in the Destroyermen series of novels by Taylor Anderson.  While in real life the Amagi was never completed, shes gets to see some action during World War II in the novels.

[Daltron]

First version reminds me of an OP Mogami.

[Haguro]

Elouda, on 21 February 2013 - 12:59 AM, said:

My guess would be a slightly less complete rebuild than on Nagato/Mutsu. Funnels would get trunked, new boilers installed, might loose a couple of 5.5in casemates, and probably gain 6 twin 5in/40s for AA. Later in the war I could see up to perhaps 10 twin 5in/40s installed. She would likely have served like the Kongos did as an escort to the carrier fleet due to her speed.

Sounds reasonable, but if the RN builds the G-3 BC's the Amagi's are slightly slower and have a little less armor thickness in the belt, deck, & barbettes.  I would expect the IJN to at least address the speed issue either by increasing horsepower and/or increasing the length.

G-3 Model

[Azumazi]

Updated the second post and working on doing a cut away for the armor for it.

[Gigaton]

The cross-sections here give good detail on the thickness of deck plating over machinery (though it can be hard to read at places due to poor quality): http://rarebook.dl.i...Wk9JmVtb249Jg==

 

Note that Japanese clearly specified all deck and belt armour in weight (in pounds per square foot, or lbs) rather than thickness in their drawings of this period, so for example the belt is actually 249mm exact (or to be exactly exact, it depends on density of VC :tongues:) rather than 254mm.

[Azumazi]

I added the eq= of the backing to it which would have been roughly 11mm of HT which = about half that to compare so 5mm or so armor.

 

The harder ones to do are the decks because one part specifies it's in two pieces, the other one in two and it points to what looks like a double plate but specifies one number so I'm like...erm what?

[Azumazi]

I will also state, I really don't like how all the designs seem to be showing the top decks not even having a little bit of armor for them on the sides which makes them open to even 4-5 inch gun fire if I am reading that correctly. So Amagi Modernized best be armoring that up for reasonable engagements *wink wink* you know, like what happened to Kirishima by some DD's....

[Daltron]

I really wish a lot of these concepts had actually been built, you know? Seems awesome!

 

Also, I agree, 5.5 centimeters of armor is nothing. That's tank armor, not battleship, or even battlecruiser armor.