Dreadnoughts-a-Deux

The pre-WWI battleship race in 1/700 scale

When she was commissioned at the end of 1906, the HMS Dreadnought (left) was the most powerful battleship the world had ever seen. Less than four years later, the SMS Großer Kurfürst (right) was laid down with the same main armament, the same speed, but about 8,000 tons more displacement, with most of that mass going to armor. Placed side by side, the thicker turret armor jumps right out.

Another obvious difference is that the German ship (top, below) has all ten guns available for a broadside, whereas legendary Admiral Jackie Fisher insisted that his pet battleship (bottom) be able to outgun an enemy while chasing her stern, since *OBVIOUSLY* everyone would flee in terror at the approach of his amazing new battleships. For a few minutes, anyway, until they built a better Dreadnought. this is why he designed her with wing turrets. Of the ten main guns, only eight can fire a broadside.

The actual age of the dreadnoughts was brief, with the first superdreadnoughts going into service just about the time Großer Kurfürst (pronounced “grocer”) got commissioned. Which just goes to show you that the entire battleship development race from 1876 to 1944 was a kind of sunk cost fallacy: vessels might take years to build only to be rendered obsolete before they came out of the dock.

Another thing I noticed is the German deck rails for moving the boats around. I’ve built enough of these ships to appreciate the genius of the design. Rather than stack boats on top of each other like all other navies at the time, the Germans prioritized order and utility. The boats on the deck of the Großer Kurfürst look like they were much easier to launch, recover, and maintain than the boats on the Dreadnought.

Here are side profiles in close-up. The Dreadnought had a prominent ram bow — in fact, she was one of the last ships to be designed for ramming other ships on purpose — while the Großer Kurfürst has more of a racing design because German engineers knew that ramming each other was a silly idea.

The German ship shrugged off hits at Jutland, but the Dreadnought was not present at the only major clash of battle fleets in the First World War, as she was in Portsmouth for a refit. However, she did get to use her ram bow in 1915, plowing right through the hapless U-29, which had surfaced right in front of her.

Both ships had torpedo nets, which were utterly useless by 1915. I am half-convinced they were only ever designed to make future hobbyists curse like sailors as the little booms refuse to stay in place while being glued.

Having a three-dimensional, side-by-side comparison was the entire point of building these kits. The naval architects who built these ships also worked from models, though of course theirs were larger and far more detailed. The model ship building hobby actually derives from the work of shipyard workers over several centuries as they worked in miniature before building a real ship. Building these kits doesn’t make me a sailor, but it does give me a better feel for the most complex and expensive machines that had ever been built at the time.