readx; The firepower of the Lexington-class battlecruisers was four twin guns with a total of eight sixteen-inch and fifty-fold guns, which was one less than the No. 59 battleship and four fewer than the South Dakota-class. If this level of firepower is more than adequate for a battlecruiser, then his level of protection is completely vulnerable, with the broadside armor belt only seven inches thick at the maximum and the horizontal armor only three and a half inches.www.biquge.info Such armor is as thin as paper for a battleship with a standard displacement of 35,000 tons.

If the No. 59 battleship wants to have a speed of up to 30 levels, and 9 naval guns are indispensable, it can only make major sacrifices in protection, and when the American shipbuilding experts proposed to weaken the side armor by a considerable part in order to allow the No. 59 battleship to reach a speed of 30 knots, the Chinese Navy also hesitated.

The Chinese Navy is different from the US Navy, and the two battleships to be purchased are not only used as battle cruisers, but also for ammunition that take into account multiple tasks such as fleet decisive battles, high-speed attacks, and land artillery bombardment, so it is doomed that the Chinese Navy cannot accept a warship with too poor protection capabilities, which is also the direct reason why Chen Jingyun rejected the 30,000-ton high-speed warship proposed by the Navy at that time. As for the U.S. Navy, you must know that in addition to the Lexington-class battlecruiser, they also have a South Dakota-class battleship, and the two are used together, so that there is such an extreme design of this Lexington-class battlecruiser.

The reason why the Lexington-class battlecruiser has such an extreme design is inseparable from the change in the strategic thinking of the US Navy after the Battle of Tereland, which believed that in order to win a modern naval war, it must meet two requirements, the first point is flexible coordination, and the second point is active attack.

The first can be achieved flexibly and synergistically through new tactical and nautical doctrines, while the second is an active offensive in which the side controls the pace of engagement and imposes its strategic intentions on the enemy. These concepts can be fully understood from the article 'U.S. Navy Tactics and Operational Planning in Time of Interwartime'.

The Chinese Navy's main strategic thinking is to face the enemy's superior forces, on the one hand, to use shore defense artillery, torpedoes, and lightning strikes to carry out coastal defensive operations, and on the other hand, its own high-speed ocean-going fleet goes to sea to attack the enemy's sea transportation lines and to avoid a decisive battle with the enemy's superior main fleet to strike at the enemy's secondary forces. In a way, this was the German attack strategy of World War II. Of course, there is also a very important reason why Chen Jingyun hopes that these warships will continue to play a role in escorting and other roles in the aircraft carrier formation in the future after they become high-speed, rather than that after the first-class aircraft carriers mature and run rampant in the Pacific Ocean, these warships that have been built at a large price can only be reduced to shore bombardment ships.

Similarly, the U.S. Navy's active offensive strategic thinking has directly influenced the construction of a new generation of U.S. warships, with the South Dakota-class with greater firepower and thicker armor being built as the main force for decisive battles, and the Lexington-class battlecruisers, which are high-speed, thin-skinned and stuffed ships, are typical offensive reconnaissance forces. In fact, in the eyes of the wealthy Americans, Lexington has never been a capital ship, but an auxiliary force used for reconnaissance and harassment.

At the same time, the Battle of Deland made the US Navy think that the distance of engagement in the future would become farther and farther, and that long-distance engagement between naval guns would become the main mode of artillery warfare in the future, which was also the main reason why the horizontal armor on the South Dakota class was more than 200 millimeters thick, and even the horizontal armor of the thin-skinned Lexington class was as thick as 3.5 inches.

The Battle of Delan brought a great change in strategic thinking to the US Navy, and also had an impact on some of the thinking of the Chinese Navy, which was manifested in the emphasis on horizontal armor, the horizontal armor of the No. 59 battleship design scheme was as thick as four inches, and the direct manifestation of the importance of long-distance engagement was to thicken the horizontal armor, and this was also to indirectly improve the ability of the ships to resist aircraft bombing, and the horizontal armor of more than 200 millimeters thick on the South Dakota class was not designed to resist aircraft bombing. Rather, it was designed to protect against enemy shells hitting horizontal armor in long-range artillery battles.

Considering the strategic needs of the Chinese Navy and the actual shipbuilding level of the United States, a group of experts led by Wei Yuan and other experts once again revised the design of the No. 59 battleship.

After the United States showed many generals of the Chinese Navy some test data of long-distance artillery battles, the Chinese Navy also agreed that the future naval warfare model would want to develop long-distance engagement, so it was decided to weaken the side armor while slightly increasing the horizontal armor. Because the thickest part of the broadside armor was only twelve inches, that is, 305 mm, while the horizontal armor was raised to five inches, that is, 127 mm.

Shut down

As for the speed that makes the shipbuilding experts of China and the United States entangled, at the beginning due to the request of Chen Jingyun, the speed was set at thirty knots, but the United States made it clear that the current power system can not meet this requirement, unless you Chinese come up with a more advanced power system, which makes the Chinese Navy quite helpless, although China's domestic power development has also made progress in recent years, but it is not too big, after several successive failures of the steam turbine in service on the Suiqing in 1915, Not only did the three destroyers fail to be equipped with domestically produced steam turbines and needed to be imported from the United States, but in the end, the Navy had to spend a lot of money on the modification to replace the domestically produced steam turbines on the Suiqing with American imports. After the Shanghai Power Company initially solved the problem, it was equipped with the next two domestically produced Suiding-class destroyers and the last lightning cruiser. Although it has been initially used, there is still a distance from imported products in terms of power output, and the three warships using domestic power units have a speed of about 0.5 knots to 0.8 knots less than the same type of ships using imported power units.

Based on the fact that the domestic power system is really overwhelmed, it is absolutely impossible for the navy to equip the two absolute main warships with a total investment of more than 100 million yuan in the next 10 years or so to equip the navy with a domestic power system.

In the eyes of the Navy, battleships, which are important weapons of the country, must not be used as experimental products by Shanghai Power Company and those domestic enterprises!

The domestic power was not usable, and the power system of the United States could not meet the requirements of Wei Yuan and a group of experts from the Department of Naval Administration, so the Navy had no choice but to abandon the 30-knots mark. For this reason, the chief of the Admiralty also personally consulted Chen Jingyun's opinion, knowing that the requirement for the speed of warships at 30 knots was put forward by Chen Jingyun, whether it was a battleship, an aircraft carrier, or other main warships, Chen Jingyun would generally require a speed of more than 30 knots, and Chen Jingyun's request was based on the needs of future aircraft carrier formations, and in fact did not take into account the current strategic needs.

After Chen Jingyun learned about this, he also felt that if he couldn't reach the 30th section, he could give up, and the 29th and 28th sections were not unacceptable.

After obtaining Chen Jingyun's approval, Wei Yuan and others in the United States quickly changed the design after providing data on the size and weight of the power system and naval guns provided in the United States, and finally reduced the speed to 29 knots.

The final design data is three triple installations with a total of nine 16-inch 50 times naval guns, 125 inches (305 mm) of side armor, 5 inches (127 mm) of horizontal armor, and is expected to reach 130,000 horsepower, a maximum speed of 29 knots, a cruising range of 15 knots and 8,000 nautical miles, and an estimated standard displacement of 40,000 tons and a full load displacement of 46,000 tons after completion.

In November 1918, half a month after the arrival of the Chinese naval delegation in the United States, China officially signed a contract with the American side. After the strong demand of the Chinese Navy and the first payment of up to $20 million for the construction of the ships, the construction of these two Chinese battleships quickly began in the United States, and at this time the South Dakota-class battleships and Lexington-class battlecruisers of the United States were still on paper, and the construction of these two types of ships would not be carried out until the second half of 1919, and it was expected that all construction would begin in 1920.

On January 6, 1919, the first ship of the two battleships ordered by China began construction, the Yandi, and on January 19, the second ship, the Yellow Emperor, started!

If nothing else, then the two battleships ordered by the Chinese Navy will become the world's first warships equipped with sixteen-inch and fifty-fold guns!

When the two battleships ordered by China started construction in the United States one after another, he said, "Although I shouted strong protests and opposition every day, China and the United States ignored it, so I said, "Ben himself also accelerated the process of the 88th Fleet, and in the face of the 16-inch and 50-fold giant guns on the Yandi-class ordered by the South Dakota class of the United States and the Chinese Navy, he said, "On the one hand, he developed 18-inch and 19-inch cannons of larger calibers, and on the other hand, he quickly and faster the design of the Kaga-class, and put forward the design of the Ise-class battleships. This is a warship with a standard displacement of 42,700 tons, and it is expected to be equipped with five triple guns with a total of 15 16-inch and 45-fold naval guns, armor protection of 11.5 inches, and horizontal armor of 4 inchesShipbuilding experts on both sides of the United States and China unanimously expressed skepticism.

In fact, he said, "I really don't have that ability, so in the end, I changed the five triple turrets to five twin turrets, and all at once the fifteen huge guns were reduced to ten." At this time, it seems to be relatively equal to China's Yandi-class battleships, as for the No. 13 battleship that I proposed, it was going to use a nineteen-inch cannon at first, and then I turned around and prepared to use an eighteen-inch cannon after I found out that it really didn't work, but whether these things on paper can be built is another matter.

Sometimes the design and design and construction that are taken for granted on paper are two different things, and the initial paper design of the Yandi-class battleship designed by China's Lieutenant General Wei Yuan also looks extremely bright, with a speed of 30 knots and a side armor of up to 330 mm, which makes people feel very excited when they see it, but when they are actually built, they cannot reach these indicators at all, and they can only weaken and weaken, and the protection and speed are successively reduced in order to ensure firepower.

In any case, when the time came to January 1919, the two warships that China had spent a lot of money to order finally started construction one after another, and with the speed of American shipbuilding, it would take two years at most to complete and launch, that is to say, the Chinese Navy would be able to get these two giant ships around 1921.

At the turn of 1918 and 1919, when the Far East set off a storm because of China's order for two warships, the war in Europe was still going on, Germany continued to resist with the use of large areas of resources and land in Eastern Europe, and the British, French and American coalition forces were still struggling on the Western Front how to break through the Russian defenses, and in Russia, the Russian Wehrmacht and Soviet troops were engaged in large-scale and tragic battles around Omsk.

In comparison, the Chinese Navy's order for two battleships is really not a big deal in the world.