It's not a question of technological advantage.
Either Britain or the US could have built ships bigger than they did historically if they had wanted to.
(and had the cash
)
The Brit's actually started two of the Lion class. Slightly superior to the Iowas but not as fast. The USA had the Montanas on the drawing board. The Brits could have actually built the Incomparable
between the wars if they hadn't learned that battlecruisers weren't the way to go.
Germany had the technology to build the H classes. France could have built bigger too.
Italy... aahhhh, OK. Maybe not. They didn't have the industrial capability to build the guns.
It's not that Japan was, or needs to be, ahead in tech'.
The building of the Yamatos was shrouded in secrecy. All reference to her guns were 40.6cm type X so people would think they were a new 16" model and large portions of them were obscured from view.
I like the idea of a SH ship tech' that allows you to Go Large on guns & armour.
So that you can build a SHBB that carries guns & armour two or three tech' levels ahead or a SHCA that similarly out-guns the same tech' year CAs.
(The idea of a SH destroyer, light cruiser or battlecruiser is, IMHO, dumb as such a ship would no longer fit its role)
A SHCV is an interesting proposition. A heavily armoured CV. Hmm...
A Shinano type vessel operated as a fleet carrier. Essex/Malta sized but slow & heavily armoured. Hmm...
EDIT: Emued by Alex
For bigger carriers: they are called super carriers, and they exist already.
As for SH Destroyers and whatnot, you don't really need them. SH destroyers would essentially have been light cruisers, SH light cruisers would have essentially been Heavy Cruisers, and SH Cruisers would have essentially been BBs/BCs. If you have the IC, you could try to build a SHBB fleet screened by BBs/BCs as capital screens and HCs as screens. Lol.
and what would it mean to have that 60 ton extra weight? just weight?
Not all guns and armor are created equal. There are heavier platings and super structures that might not be as strong as lighter ones (for example, the super structure used on almost all US ships was stronger and lighter than their Japanese equivalent). There are also smart ways on saving weight that had to be developed. For example, sloped armor increases your armor protection compared to a vertical plate by quite a bit with just a simple bit of geometry, but it took quite a while to discover that. Some [ship] bows are more hydrodynamic and allowed you to get a wider engine, or methods of improving the volume you could fit in a certain tonnage so you could fit more engines/guns/stuff without making your ship bigger and adding a lot of empty weight that needed tons of armor as well. Older guns weren't necessarily as powerful, accurate, or flexible as more modern guns, etc. And ammunition can make a huge difference as well. The list of reason why that could happen goes on and on.
Also, that's 60
k tons, as in
60,000 tons. Not 60.
I'm pretty sure displacement was used in the Naval disarmament treaties, but meant very little in actual combat or in game modelling. What should matter is something that can be modeled in the game, like relative speed, armor, and plane capacity of a US BB or CV vs the lower speed but increased hull / armor of a Japanese BB or more armor / fewer planes of a UK CV. Hopefully this can be modeled in game somehow, such as by naval doctrines. This could also be used to model GER's pocket battleships / battlecruisers - lower attack and defense, but higher convoy attack and speed than a UK BB.
Why are you comparing PBs to BBs? PBs were just overarmed Heavy Cruisers, they are pretty incomparable to the real thing. Bismarck, on the other hand, was a match or better than most UK BBs. But two ships can't take on the world's largest navy by themselves.
Although, to refer to your point, why? There's already a way of doing that: the tech system. If your ships have inferior engine tech but higher armor and gun techs then you will have better guns and armor, but be slower. This is already there. You don't need a doctrine to control that because you already control it through the
design choices you choose to make.
The only thing the game needs to model better is that not all fleet carriers were created equal.
So long as (later) US BBs can keep up with US CVs on map, we are good. If they can't, then there is really no point in building battleships as US. The US Fast BBs North Carolina / South Dakota / Iowa class were designed to keep up with the Lexington and Saratoga, which were built on Battlecruiser hulls. Speed is key here, not displacement.
For Germany, unless the Bismark et al can run from or disengage from a UK BB, they will likewise be pointless. Again, speed, armor, and firepower are more important than displacement to determine where they fit in game.
Actually, displacement matters a
lot, because displacement is the best indicator of a battleship's strength in a given era. Given roughly equal technological advancements, everything that made a BB a BB could be found in its displacement (excluding optics and radar). If you wanted it to go faster, you gave it a bigger engine, which affected its tonnage. If you wanted it to be stronger, you gave it bigger guns which meant more tonnage. If you wanted to be better protected, you gave it more armor, which affected its tonnage. Etc, etc. This is why the best BBs of WWII were also the heaviest. The Iowa was one of the heaviest ships of the war, and it was the best BB of the war.
edit: weren't the Montana class BBs too big to fit through the locks of the Panama Canal?
No, they weren't too big. In fact they were designed to literally be the largest thing capable of fitting through the canal. Had BBs remained popular for hundreds of years after WWII, I still doubt we ever would have seen ships much larger than Montana (although much heavier? Probably). USN's only truly unbreakable commandment when you built ships was that you could
never make it too big to cross the canal, which is a good idea because the US has to potentially deal with both a pacific and atlantic theater and being able to easily transfer ships from coast to coast is a strategic necessity.
Are there actually standardized rules for this stuff? afaik a large cruiser, battle crusier, fast battleship, battleship and super battleship could all mean the same thing depending on who named it. I'm not pretending to be well versed in naval classifications but to be perfectly honest the whole system seems pretty shit.
Well, the problem is that things progressed with time. What classifies as one kind of ship in one era, would count as another in another era. That is because ship building up until the invention of carriers massively favored bigger ships, so you generally saw the size and tonnage of almost every kind of ship increase with time.
In other words, in terms of size and weight, yesterday's battleships became cruisers, and the cruisers became light cruisers, and the LCs became destroyers. It's not that it's shit, its that things changed drastically over time. The main reason why was guns.
Bigger guns were by nature heavier. This also meant that your opponent needed to be able to defend from them, meaning they needed more armor. And to avoid being a sitting duck with an extra 2k tons of armor you needed to get a much bigger, heavier engine to push you along. You can see how it very quickly spirals out of control, no?
So, from a general view, there is no real basis for the classification system. However, within each major period of naval history there are generally accepted criteria that classified them. Naval treaties helped simplify this down after WWI, however. Perhaps most importantly, the upper limits they set on the size of both big and small ships kept things from exploding by limiting ship size from exploding. Had the Washington and London Naval treaties never been signed and the Tillmans built, we probably would have seen Montana-sized ships acting as Heavy Cruisers with H-44s as BBs by the time of WWII.
The Yamato was 30% heavier than Iowa class and 60% heavier than South Dakota class battleships. Imo that warrants a new label to differentiate it, unless we wrap all BB under the same label in which case there will be a pretty wide scope and wouldn't mean much. There is a lot more grounds for this classification imo than differentiating among the ones I mentioned above.
I think the most important differentiating factor is that these ships were all around
at the same rough time. Had they not, there would have been no need for this distinction. Just like the term super carrier woudn't be needed if most carriers weren't drastically smaller and fielded far fewer aircraft.
