G3 Battle Cruiser and N3 Battleship

[Hood]

I would be careful relying on Maciej Chodnicki's reconstructed drawings. While the armour schemes might be reasonably well detailed there are some errors in his drawings of the 1921 series.
And of course if you read the labels the N3 Variant 2 drawing says "This drawing is based on description" so is a what-if reconstruction, presumably based on Variant 1 with 16in turrets and some hull length added.

For all we know they could be based off the smaller line drawings which were included in (for example) The Grand Fleet by DK Brown and can be seen in earlier posts on this thread.

 

[Tzoli]

There is info in Friedman and likely in the official papers for a modified N3 with stated 4 triple 16" turrets. Same way there are two O3 designs, one of the N3 linage the other the actual Nelson:

The latest research revealed that in fact a further ‘O3’ design was prepared. This was not submitted to the Admirals Staff as it was ready only in Dec 1921 when it was absolutely sure that battleships of the future will be limited to 35.000 tons and 406mm guns by the Washington Treaty. This version was more of a ‘hedge’ bet in case the treaty fails somehow. As we know now it did not and the ‘O3’ marking got reused later for the NELSON class design effort.

This newly discovered design is very sketchy. It is an enlarged ‘N3’ which got the same dimensions as the battlecruiser ‘G3’ in order to maximize the dimensions offered by docking limitations. Based on the surviving information this would have been a 261m long, 51.000 tons ship with 60.000 SHP machinery supported by two funnels, capable of 23.5 knots. Armament mirrored the ‘N3’ with armor somewhat reduced due to greater length, with main armored decks cut back to 178mm over magazines and 127mm over machinery. It is speculated that the two funnels and the longer hull is an indication of either an alternating (ER-BR-ER-BR) machinery layout or a complete redesign for turbo-electric propulsion.

However even the base ‘N3’ variant was not completely finished, for example the exact amount of boilers and the funnel uptake protection details were not set.

Washington Cherry Trees II./ Part 3

The G3

warshipprojects.com

 

[Tzoli]

Accordimg to my friend Ákos / Csatahajós, who written the article I've posted, Maciej's drawings regarding the armour scheme and power plants / engines are as accurate as possible.

 

[mchodnic]

Hi

Accordimg to my friend Ákos / Csatahajós, who written the article I've posted, Maciej's drawings regarding the armour scheme and power plants / engines are as accurate as possible.

Thank You.

In case on sources of my drawings - it depends. First original over 10 years old were based on some low quality drawings from R&R book, Brown book and article in Warship International in 70thies (IIRC)
Later upgredes included some scans/photos of original plans, but low quality, co details could (or should) be wrong on my interpretation of limited data.

I recently upgraded drawings that I shared for article "Washington Cherry trees", but description is only in Polish sorry.

In G3 - lowest drawing is armour scheme of original G3 design wih 180 000 SHP, guns 16.5 inch and very thin armour over machienry.
In N3 lowest drawing is alternative location of AA guns and aft directors. I have seen various combinations, and I'm not sure what was correct - possibly all were "correct" as design never finalised, so all were viable options.
I omitted any protection of lower part of the funnel, as this was not set when whole program was scrapped.
In N3 with 12x16" guns lowest drawing is G3 final version. Thant N3 with dosen of main guns was expected to have the same length as G3. So for comparison to show what was cost of extra 8-9 knots (from 23 to 31-32 knots)
Hope You enjoy them.