Maximum battleship

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The "maximum battleships," also known as the "Tillman Battleships" were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 to the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman. The United States Navy was not interested in the designs at all, and only drew them up to win support from the Committee on Naval Affairs, on which Tillman sat. They were among the most spectacular battleship designs ever produced.

Senator Tillman had grown impatient with the Navy's requests for larger battleships every year as well as the Navy's habit of building battleships significantly larger than Congress authorized. He accordingly instructed the Navy to design "maximum battleships," the largest battleships that they could use.

The only limits on the potential size of an American battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the Panama Canal. The locks measure roughly 1000 feet by 110 feet, and so the "maximum battleships" were 975 feet (297 meters) long and 108 feet (33 meters) in beam. Harbor depths constrained draft to 32.75 feet (10 meters).

Tillman's first request, in 1912-1913, was never completed, and though the studies it involved had some influence on the design of the Pennsylvania class of battleships, that class was essentially just an enlargement of the preceding Nevada class. In 1916, he repeated his request, and this time the Navy's Bureau of Construction and Repair produced a series of design studies, which again had some influence on the design of the next class of battleships, in this case the South Dakotas, an enlargement of the previous Colorado class.

After the first four design studies were complete, design IV was chosen for further development and three additional studies, IV-1, IV-2, and IV-3, were prepared. At the request of Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, these designs used 18-inch guns instead of the 16-inch/50-calibers used in the earlier studies. The Navy decided that design IV-2 was the most practical (or perhaps the least impractical) and presented it to Congress early in 1917.

These designs differed from the battleships being built in two significant ways beyond just their size. Firstly, unlike preceding classes, the "maximum battleships" were designed with a continuous flush main deck. Most battleships in this era had a long forecastle deck. Secondly, the Tillman designs all included five casemate guns mounted aft, two on each side and one at the tip of the stern. Similar "stern chasers" had been previously mounted in the Nevada class, but were omitted from the Pennsylvania class. These casemates were a return to an older design idea; American battleship designers had abandoned hull-mounted casemates after the New Mexico class. They had transpired to be too "wet" -- heavy seas rendered them unusable -- and they had been removed from all earlier classes. However, the casemates on the "maximum battleships" would have been higher above the waterline than they had been on earlier designs, so it is possible that their huge size and flush decks would have provided enough freeboard astern to keep the casemates dry.

The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited naval armaments, causing the cancellation of the South Dakota-class battleships and halting all consideration of the "maximum battleships."

	Tillman I	Tillman II	Tillman III	Tillman IV	Tillman IV-1	Tillman IV-2	South Dakota class	Iowa class	Montana class	Nimitz class CVN
Design	13 Dec 1916	13 Dec 1916	13 Dec 1916	29 Dec 1916	30 Jan 1917	30 Jan 1917	8 Jul 1918	9 Jun 1938	6 Feb 1940	1960s
Displace- ment	70,000 tons	70,000 tons	63,500 tons	80,000 tons	80,000 tons	80,000 tons	43,200 tons	45,000 tons	70,000 tons	98,500 tons
Length	975 feet						660 feet	860 feet	921 feet	1092 feet
Beam	108 feet						106 feet	108 feet	121 feet	134 feet
Draft	32.75 feet						32.75 feet	36 feet	36 feet	38 feet
Speed	26.5 knots	26.5 knots	30 knots	25.2 knots	25.2 knots	25.2 knots	23.5 knots	33 knots	28 knots	30+ knots
Main Battery	12 16"/50 in four triple turrets	24 16"/50 in four 6-gun turrets	12 16"/50 in four triple turrets	24 16"/50 in four 6-gun turrets	13 18"/50 in five twin and one triple turret	15 18"/50 in five triple turrets	12 16"/50 in four triple turrets	Nine 16"/50 in three triple turrets	12 16"/50 guns in four triple turrets	air wing