I think there are some ways in which you could collapse your battleship list, Kung, but they require retuning our heads to the '88 frequency and are bound to cause a raising of eyebrows from a lot of players. I'll start with the most controversial.
Service life for this class was calculated at around 20 years, so by 1888 most of the ships figuring in this group weren't far from the breaker's yard. Additionally, advances in armour quality and big-gun performance had left them unfitted for fleet use. The result was that those that hadn't been turned into depot ships and the like had mostly been re-classified as 'coast defence' ships. Now for the controversial part - Torpedo Boats were also originally designed as purpose built coast defence units while destroyers didn't begin arriving until 1893 (as fleet escorts to protect against TBs when operating off an enemy coast) and didn't show any real combat advantage over TBs other than operating range until the River class of 1903 - just about kick-off for your World War. So the obvious move is to junk the 'Destroyer' build category and replace it with 'Coast Defence' - some of which will be gun armed (your 1873 Ironclads) and some torpedo armed (the original TBs). When it comes time to build genuine destroyers you can introduce them as low-grade, reduced range unprotected cruisers which is tactically what they were.
The rest is a lot more straightforward.
Since the distinguishing feature is an 'armament' advance rather than a 'ship' advance I wouldn't have thought they warranted a category of their own. In any event they were rapidly overtaken by the Admirals so I think you could safely drop them back to the Coast Defence classification or lump them in with the Admirals. I'd go for the former.
These would then be your first genuine Battleship class.
I think you're on the money here - a significant upscaling - and with the various successors a numerically important group.
You have enough qualitative improvements here to justify them as a separate build group.
You could certainly argue that they represent a significant improvement, but they can equally be viewed as a variation on the Majestic theme. If you have the space you could keep them separate - if not I think it would be perfectly defensible to lump them in with their predecessors.
These definitely need a stand alone group - first because of the new design direction and then because of their bleed into the Dreadnought.
Now all you have to do is wait for all the naval grognards to get on board with competing views and you should be able to sort something out from the resulting mess.
Service life for this class was calculated at around 20 years, so by 1888 most of the ships figuring in this group weren't far from the breaker's yard. Additionally, advances in armour quality and big-gun performance had left them unfitted for fleet use. The result was that those that hadn't been turned into depot ships and the like had mostly been re-classified as 'coast defence' ships. Now for the controversial part - Torpedo Boats were also originally designed as purpose built coast defence units while destroyers didn't begin arriving until 1893 (as fleet escorts to protect against TBs when operating off an enemy coast) and didn't show any real combat advantage over TBs other than operating range until the River class of 1903 - just about kick-off for your World War. So the obvious move is to junk the 'Destroyer' build category and replace it with 'Coast Defence' - some of which will be gun armed (your 1873 Ironclads) and some torpedo armed (the original TBs). When it comes time to build genuine destroyers you can introduce them as low-grade, reduced range unprotected cruisers which is tactically what they were.
The rest is a lot more straightforward.
Since the distinguishing feature is an 'armament' advance rather than a 'ship' advance I wouldn't have thought they warranted a category of their own. In any event they were rapidly overtaken by the Admirals so I think you could safely drop them back to the Coast Defence classification or lump them in with the Admirals. I'd go for the former.
These would then be your first genuine Battleship class.
I think you're on the money here - a significant upscaling - and with the various successors a numerically important group.
You have enough qualitative improvements here to justify them as a separate build group.
You could certainly argue that they represent a significant improvement, but they can equally be viewed as a variation on the Majestic theme. If you have the space you could keep them separate - if not I think it would be perfectly defensible to lump them in with their predecessors.
These definitely need a stand alone group - first because of the new design direction and then because of their bleed into the Dreadnought.
Now all you have to do is wait for all the naval grognards to get on board with competing views and you should be able to sort something out from the resulting mess.
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