Alternative I-class BCs

[grayst]

My experiences with this game keep tempting towards the idea of a redesigned I-class BC for the RN.

Instead of a hammer-armed eggshell (8 x 12", 6" belt) with relatively poor (25kt) speed, how realistic would it have been to have something like:

- 10 x 9.2" in 5 twin turrets, in Dreadnought config
- 8" - 9" belt
- 27kt speed

...?

The guys at Warship Projects don't seem to like the idea, but from experience in Jutland I know that this 9.2" I-class would be much better at plinking CLs, battering PDs and knifing crippled BBs - which is all I use the I-class for anyway!

The advantages are more barrels, higher ROF, more armour and better speed, meaning they can actually run down the CLs. The disadvantage is insufficient firepower to go against enemy BCs or BBs, but you're mad to do that with an I-class anyway.

The big question is what the German reaction would have been to such a ship, and whether it would have been outclassed by the Germans moving to the true BC first.

I don't see that as likely; historically the Germans built Bluecher to a conservative super-AC design even with some indications that Invincible had gone to 12" guns, so their reaction to this fast 9.2" super-AC would probably just be an improved, turbine-powered Bluecher.

Maybe the RN would choose to go in the next (Lion) generation to 8 x 12" on the centreline, but you'd think / hope that the idea of protection against own weapons would dictate at least an 11" belt - probably about as large and expensive as the historical Lion. OTOH, they might stay with 10 x 9.2" but all on the centreline.

Any thoughts?

 

[saddletank]

The German reaction to such a ship would have been and was the Blucher. My understanding was that the admiralty 'leaked' news in advance that the new armoured cruiser would have 9.2" guns which was the standard main gun for the last 2 or 3 classes of RN armoured cruiser up until that time and the Germans designed their ship on that basis.

While such mental exercises are fun I think they are just that, fun mental exercises. Fisher was in charge and Fisher wanted the biggest guns he could have sitting on a hull having the top speed the technology would then allow and armour be damned. Remember we all have hindsight so I don't see any other ship being built while Fisher was around. Interestingly the Von der Tann built only marginally later and with a very similar layout gave a much better ship in every respect except shell weight.

The use of battleship armament was the key failure of the battle cruiser design for me, not armour thickness or speed, but the guns. Once an admiral had a ship that was armed like a battleship it was hardly surprising that he wanted to use it like one. If the RN had gone for a dreadnought armoured cruiser with 9.2" or even the 10" guns of the Swiftsure class, an armour scheme slightly heavier than the Minotaurs and a speed of around 26 knots it would have produced an interesting ship - yet what task would she have performed?

To expensive as a commerce protection vessel, too weak to fight in the battle line and a bit of overkill as a fleet scout.

 

[barkhauer]

Yeah, the Brits were all about firepower and speed, armour was for the weak. What you've really described there would be much more believable as a German design.

 

[Von der Tann]

Probably, yes. Von der Tann was also built for service in home waters, while the I-class ships were supposed to defend British sea power anywhere on the oceans and had to reserve space for crew accommodations, space (and weight) the Germans could use for engines and armour. Twenty years later, the Scharnhorst class ships of the Kriegsmarine were also very cramped, which made the long cruises in the Atlantic rather uncomfortable for the crews.

 

[martin worsey]

My experiences with this game keep tempting towards the idea of a redesigned I-class BC for the RN.

Instead of a hammer-armed eggshell (8 x 12", 6" belt) with relatively poor (25kt) speed, how realistic would it have been to have something like:

- 10 x 9.2" in 5 twin turrets, in Dreadnought config
- 8" - 9" belt
- 27kt speed

...?

The guys at Warship Projects don't seem to like the idea, but from experience in Jutland I know that this 9.2" I-class would be much better at plinking CLs, battering PDs and knifing crippled BBs - which is all I use the I-class for anyway!

The advantages are more barrels, higher ROF, more armour and better speed, meaning they can actually run down the CLs. The disadvantage is insufficient firepower to go against enemy BCs or BBs, but you're mad to do that with an I-class anyway.

The big question is what the German reaction would have been to such a ship, and whether it would have been outclassed by the Germans moving to the true BC first.

I don't see that as likely; historically the Germans built Bluecher to a conservative super-AC design even with some indications that Invincible had gone to 12" guns, so their reaction to this fast 9.2" super-AC would probably just be an improved, turbine-powered Bluecher.

Maybe the RN would choose to go in the next (Lion) generation to 8 x 12" on the centreline, but you'd think / hope that the idea of protection against own weapons would dictate at least an 11" belt - probably about as large and expensive as the historical Lion. OTOH, they might stay with 10 x 9.2" but all on the centreline.

Any thoughts?

My understanding was that the Admiralty was similarly tempted. You are however using the benefit of hindsight to some extent.
When Invincible was designed, she was thought of as an Armoured Cruiser with big guns (and she was so categorised until 1911). Thus she was intended to fight Armoured Cruisers (i.e. egg shells armed with pea shooters) and was wonderfully suited to this purpose. Unfortunately, in Jutland, there are no German AC’s left (all sunk or retired into non-combat roles) so the I classes are not much use; we need to hope that SES will make a 1914-15 game and thus we will see their true value.
The 9.2” alternatives were submitted for consideration as alternatives to the Lion and Indefatigable classes and largely for the purposes that you suggest (testimony to how well Jutland deals with light cruisers).
Similarly, the “battlecruiser” type was under consideration much earlier than Lion. Fisher wanted a “hybrid” type with 25 knot speed, battleship armour and big guns. However, the naval budget was astronomic at this time and speed tends to be expensive. The decision was that Dreadnoughts would suffice in a war with Germany and they were considerably cheaper than the “hybrid” type.
In my opinion, Von der Tann is vastly under hyped historically (probably because she was German) as she was the first “true” battlecruiser and every bit as revolutionary and ground breaking as Dreadnought or Invincible. Possibly, the Germans would have been the innovators in any event and we would have had to speculate on what the British reaction would have been.

 

[martin worsey]

Would just add detail of possible ships considered.
In 1907, Director of Naval Ordnance, John Jellicoe suggested that a 9.2” gunned cruiser would represent a better investment. This design had a similar layout to Invincible but carried 8 x 9.2” had a 6” belt and 25 kn speed.
Work on this design was cancelled when it became known that the Germans were building 11” gunned ships.
Initial alternative designs included 8 x 12”L50 with 9” belt plus 10 x 12” with a 10” belt.
The design with 10 guns included triple gun A and X turrets. Variants included 3 and 4 triple turrets.
Unfortunately, these designs were not adopted and the much less useful Indefatigable was built. Having made this mistake, it was compounded with the later addition of 2 further ships, which were obsolete before they were completed.
Designs were submitted in 1913 for ships with 8 x 9.2” with 6” belt and 28 kn speed but they were not adopted.

 

[saddletank]

Work on this design was cancelled when it became known that the Germans were building 11” gunned ships.

This interests me. Which ship(s)? Von der Tann was built after Invincible and in response to her.

 

[Bullethead]

In 1907, Director of Naval Ordnance, John Jellicoe suggested that a 9.2” gunned cruiser would represent a better investment. This design had a similar layout to Invincible but carried 8 x 9.2” had a 6” belt and 25 kn speed.
...
Unfortunately, these designs were not adopted and the much less useful Indefatigable was built.
...
Designs were submitted in 1913 for ships with 8 x 9.2” with 6” belt and 28 kn speed but they were not adopted.

In 1915, the RN finally did decide to build something similar: the Cavendish class with 7x 7.5", 3" armor, and 30 knots. While too late for WW1, some were just entering service when the naval treaty negotiations were cranking up, so the 10,000 ton, 8" gun limits of the "Treaty Cruisers" were based directly on them. Thus, for a decade or 2, everybody built such ships instead of more 6" cruisers (for many reasons, but one of them was having to match the opposition).

I really can't fault the RN for rejecting a "modernized AC" or "pre-Treaty Treaty Cruiser" in favor of Invincible. IMHO, in the context of a battlefleet, the niche between the all-important battleships and the expendable flotillas (which include small, cheap WW1-type CLs) is very fuzzy and no navy ever arrived at a good solution for what type of ship to put in there. All alternatives have serious drawbacks. In fact, IMHO it's arguable that there really wasn't any niche there at all and, if naval evolution had been left to run its natural course instead of being constrained by treaties, this would have become clear over time.

But I'll get to that in a minute. For now, back to the choice between AC-type things and BC-type things...

Winning the scouting battle was a crucial role for fleet cruisers as long as fleet actions were decided by guns, so cruisers had to be built with this goal in mind. There are basically 2 ways to win the scouting battle; either have superior numbers of scouts that are similar to the enemy's, or have relatively fewer scouts that are individually significantly superior to the enemy's. Assuming a limited budget, these options are largely mutually exclusive. Now let's assume both options cost about the same amount in total. Which do you choose?

The advantage of having more but weaker ships is that you have more ships available. Thus, you can detach some for other duties or lose some in action without crippling your force, and they're easier to replace. But OTOH, you'll always be at risk of the enemy taking the other option, in which case he'll be able to blow through your screen and you lose the vital scouting battle.

IOW, there was ALWAYS an incentive for somebody to create a contemporary version of Invincible to stomp on its contemporary versions of ACs. Not only in Fisher's time but long afterwards. The US Alaska and the WW2 Scharnhorst were both intended to stomp on Treaty Cruisers, while Strassbourg was intended to stomp on panzerschiffs (which themselves were intended to at least fight off Treaty Cruisers). Such developments being inevitable, you might as well go ahead and be the 1st to build the bigger ships, to at least have an advantage for the few years it will take the enemy to follow suit.

Of course, the problem with building BCs is that they're at least borderline white elephants, if not completely so. They're too expensive to have in large numbers, major bad news if lost, and take a long time to replace. And all this for what is, at the bottom line, really just a preliminary skirmish to the decisive action.

Now, as to whether there was really a need for such a medium ship at all, I thnk it's instructive (although with several grains of salt) to look at the checkered history of Treaty Cruisers in most navies. The most important thing to understand about them is that they were NOT the product of natural naval evolution to fill a well-understood and needed role in battlefleets. Instead, they were arbitrary political creations. So, just because WW2 navies had large numbers of them doesn't mean the navies actually wanted them or would have built them except under duress. In fact, naval writing in the interwar period is full of articles trying to figure out what to do with the damned things in the context of a fleet action.

As mentioned above, the Cavendish-class set the treaty limits on cruisers, but this was simply because they were the biggest new cruisers then in existence, so the politicians drew the line there as they did for most other types of ship. However, Cavendish wasn't designed for fleet work, but rather for hunting down commerce raiders all over the world. As such, she was about twice as big (and IIRC about 3-4 times as expensive) as a contemporary flotilla-oriented CL. This made the class rather too expensive replace all existing CLs with, and too valuable to toss into the DD attack meatgrinder anyway.

Thus, were it not for other provisions of the treaties, it's likely that few such ships would have been built. But with the massive scrapping programs and the "battleship holiday", Treaty Cruisers were the most powerful ships navies could build in any quantity for a long time, so everybody built as many as they could to keep their fleets as strong as possible. IOW, as with most artificial limits, the maximum soon became the effective practical minimum with everybody cheating on it to a greater or lesser extent, intentionally or not.

Note, therefore, that the desire to build something bigger and badder than the enemy was always there, it's just that the treaties made this difficult to do. But even so, ships eventually appeared that, in the absence of aircraft making the whole issue moot, would have done to the Treaty Cruiser concept what the 1st BCs did to the predreadnought AC concept. Likewise, at the lower end, most folks eventually decided that 6" cruisers were better than 8" cruisers for actual fleet work. IOW, the natural evolutionary forces were drawing away from medium-caliber ships in both directions. This argues that there wasn't any real need for such ships to begin with.

 

[martin worsey]

This interests me. Which ship(s)? Von der Tann was built after Invincible and in response to her.

In 1907, the Invincible class were in construction but not complete. The 9" class were thus intended as a follow on to Invincible. VdT was commenced in 1908 and the and Indefatigable in 1909. I don't think this contradicts your suggestion which I incidently agree with.

BH - my point with Indefatigable is that she was too lightly armoured (even less armour than Invincible) to contend with VdT, was too expensive and incorrectly equiped to fight LC's and the British already had the Invincibles and lots of AC's to contend with similar types. Otherwise I don't disagree with what you are saying.

 

[Tanyrhiew]

Indefatigable was a one off, by the time she was launched the germans had VdT which spurred the development of the Lion class in response. The Indefatigable design was chosen for the Australian & New Zealand ships simply because that were what those colonies could afford (the Lions were more expensive) and were a better fit for defence in the Pacific (more economical to run). The RN obviously came to the same conclusion that Indefatigable was no mach for VdT so they did not build any more for themselves, the colonials were another matter entirely.

Love the fact that New Zealand stopped paying for the ship in 1957. When was the shp scrapped exactly (damn that would make a good its quiet around here question). Makes you wonder when the UK payed the last installment for the last of the 'Capital' ships.

On another note, how long do you think it will be befoe the RN consists of the new QE carriers, the trident subs and HMS Victory (and possibly the plastic duck for the Admirals bath)?

 

[saddletank]

BH... interesting post. However I still don't see the logic in building super-cruisers. To protect global commerce, to hunt down raiders and to screen for the fleet it would seem that something along the gunpower of an Achilles with something like that level of armour and 3 more knots would be a very good solution and certainly cheaper than the I class. Given that VdT was a response to the I class... there still does not seem to be any real logic for the jump from the Minotaurs to the Invincibles when in fact your post suggests that the better solution would be a lesser gunned but quicker Minotaur. If naval strategists and designers came to that conclusion in the 1930s why didn't they 20 years sooner?

Admittedly Fisher was a bit bonkers about big guns but Britain had a long history throughout the Victorian era of building in a reactionary way where France or Italy or Russia would build a ship and the RN would build a white elephant that was designed to counter it and surely by the end of Victoria's reign someone somewhere in the admiralty had worked out this was a flawed policy.

My experience in the Jutland game is that armoured cruisers make an excellent screen and I much prefer a 22 or 23 knot Achilles or Minotaur - heck even a 24 knot Donegal over a 25 knot Town or a 28 knot Arethusa. If visibility is extremely low any screen ship caught under the guns of an enemy battle line is dead meat, no matter what its speed or armour and given good visibility a few ACs will push in any CL screen and find the enemy battleline beyond its gun range and still have the room to fall back.

 

[Tanyrhiew]

The latest research by Sumida / Lambert et al is that cost (appropriate with the current spending reveiw) was a major factor in Fisher coming up with the Battlecruiser concept in the first place - combine the armoured cruiser and scout cruiser into one type capable of global deployment, the better for dealing with French/Russian AC/PC's while reducing the number of ships required thus cuting costs. The rest of the Admiralty board disagreed and came up with the Dreadnought compromise which Fisher did not want. His idea of of HMS Unapproachable (Invincble) was what he really intended.

The irony of all this is that the Dreadnought Battleship is an accidental byproduct of a desire to cut costs thus starting a highly expensive arms race that lead to an even more expensive world war (the UK's national debt doubled 12 times duringteh Great War according to one book I read and which I cannot remember the name of).

**** happens!

 

[saddletank]

I'm not sure I understand, are you saying that modern research is saying that Invincible was not Fisher's brainchild or that it was?

I am surprised that the logic of a super-cruiser newly built to counter potential enemy ACs and PCs would cause said potential enemies to build their own and thus restore the status quo wasn't blindingly obvious. Or did the Admiralty think that no power would have the financial and industrial resources to challenge Britain?

 

[Tanyrhiew]

It was what he intended and not Dreadnought which of course came first. I don't think anyone was that big on analysis back then, engineering yes, analysis no. Fisher may have had some idea that stealing a march on everyone else by using the world's largest ship building industry but as he always played his card's close to his chest (to the extent that 100 years later historians are just beginning to figure things out) noone knows. I don't think Fisher ever thought things through to their logical conclusion, broad brushstrokes and generalisation was his thing, not really surprising considering he had so much to to get done in his first stint as 1st Sea Lord. I don't think Tirpitz was much better with his monomania for riskisflotte strategy.

 

[Bullethead]

BH... interesting post. However I still don't see the logic in building super-cruisers. To protect global commerce, to hunt down raiders and to screen for the fleet it would seem that something along the gunpower of an Achilles with something like that level of armour and 3 more knots would be a very good solution and certainly cheaper than the I class. Given that VdT was a response to the I class... there still does not seem to be any real logic for the jump from the Minotaurs to the Invincibles when in fact your post suggests that the better solution would be a lesser gunned but quicker Minotaur. If naval strategists and designers came to that conclusion in the 1930s why didn't they 20 years sooner?

But you can't just whistle up that extra speed by tweaking an existing design. If it was that easy, they'd have already done it with earlier ships. Increasing speed is what drives up the size and cost of ships. For example, 14,000-ton Minotaur needed 27,000hp to go 23 knots, but 17,000-ton Invincible needed 41,000hp to go 25 knots. IOW, a mere 10% increase in speed required over a 50% increase in power, most of which came in the form of adding more boilers of the same general type (swapping VTEs for turbines mostly just allowed the increased power to be used). This and the extra fuel required to feed all those horses (especially at cruising speeds, where early turbines really sucked) accounted for most of the displacement and dimensional increases over the previous ACs.

And that was just carrying the same armor as before. Had they also added 50% thicker armor (6" to 9"), which would have increased armor weight rather more than 50% due to it having to cover a larger area on a bigger ship, which would have jacked the displacement up even more. This would have required even more power to reach the desired speed, and thus made the ship even bigger and more expensive yet again. So keeping the armor the same seems a reasonable decision, especially considering Invincible had a few years to enjoy dominance before other navies followed suit.

So, once Their Lordships had committed to the higher speed, they were stuck with a much more expensive ship than they'd had before, regardless of how they armed her. Given the unprecedented expense for what wasn't even a battleship, naturally Their Lordships wanted to get the most out of their investment. In this light, going with 12" guns over 9.2" seems a good idea, especially in terms of global deployments. On foreign stations, the most likely enemies were ACs (probably more than 1 at a time) and 2nd-class predreadnoughts of about the same power but with rather more armor. It does no good to be able to chase down the enemy if you can't beat him, and with only AC armor, the new BC might have been overwhelmed by 2 conventional ACs. However, if you can use your speed to dictate the range, have guns that outrange the enemy, and can hurt battleships, then you can deal with either situation.

My experience in the Jutland game is that armoured cruisers make an excellent screen and I much prefer a 22 or 23 knot Achilles or Minotaur - heck even a 24 knot Donegal over a 25 knot Town or a 28 knot Arethusa. If visibility is extremely low any screen ship caught under the guns of an enemy battle line is dead meat, no matter what its speed or armour and given good visibility a few ACs will push in any CL screen and find the enemy battleline beyond its gun range and still have the room to fall back.

In the North Sea, the RN enjoyed both overwhelmingly superior numbers of CLs, plus had all those ACs which the Germans couldn't match at all. The same couldn't be said about other theaters, however. It also wasn't normal for the North Sea--it was only possible because the UK was then on friendly terms simultaneously with every other significant naval power, which had never happened before. This allowed the RN to neglect many of its normal foreign commitments and concentrate in home waters.

In any case, your example illustrates what I was saying. Having scouts that are significantly more powerful than the enemy's (ACs vs. CLs in this case) is always a big advantage. If it was your fleet on the short end of this exchance, surely you'd respond by building BC-type ships to swing the balance back in your favor. The enemy would eventually reply in kind, but even the resulting stalemate would be better than the previous losing situation.

That's why I think that, once the dreadnought era started, medium-caliber ships would have disappeared if nature had been allowed to run its course. They were too big and expensive for use as attrition units and too small to be useful scouts because somebody would certainly have built a battlecruiser eventually.

 

[JebUSMC]

Also keep in mind that the great expense of the BCs combined with naval treaties and advancing boiler technology are the main reasons there was a huge resurgence in medium caliber ships between the wars. Even the US had gotten into the BC act finally and would've had six of them if it wasn't for the treaties, largely engineered and controlled by the US. Heavy Cruisers became the poor man's battleship and the arms race continued. Without this the Battlecruiser would've been the cruiser of choice. No Heavy Cruiser existed before the Washington Naval Treaty.

 

[martin worsey]

In any case, your example illustrates what I was saying. Having scouts that are significantly more powerful than the enemy's (ACs vs. CLs in this case) is always a big advantage. If it was your fleet on the short end of this exchance, surely you'd respond by building BC-type ships to swing the balance back in your favor. The enemy would eventually reply in kind, but even the resulting stalemate would be better than the previous losing situation.

That's why I think that, once the dreadnought era started, medium-caliber ships would have disappeared if nature had been allowed to run its course. They were too big and expensive for use as attrition units and too small to be useful scouts because somebody would certainly have built a battlecruiser eventually.

The problem with determining what was and was not considered for design and what was adopted for construction was the lack of actual combat experience which contemporary navies were able to draw. With the exception of the RJW, there was really no battle of annihilation from which lessons could be learned. Similarly, history is full of examples of the wrong lessons being learned from conflicts.
Thus, in many ways, the selection of warship types to build would be based upon theory and contemporary trends.
If you look at the era before Dreadnought, the major maritime nations spent roughly equal amounts on battleships and armoured cruisers. The exception would be Germany in which the ratio was approximately 3:1 (presumably because her opportunities for commerce raiding were limited by lack of overseas bases). In the post Dreadnought era, many navies had nothing intermediate between battleship and light cruiser (such as the USA) and only Japan had a really high proportion of battlecruisers (and her battleships were faster and more lightly armoured than their contemporaries). If we look at the designs and constructions that were halted by the Washington treaty, they were all battlecruisers or fast battleships. Thus the construction strategies were constantly changing.
With respect to light cruisers, they were becoming larger and progressively armed with bigger guns over time. In addition to the Cavendish class mentioned, there is also the Courageous class which went the whole hog and mounted heavy guns in a light cruiser. Thus the trend in cruisers may have eventually led to intermediate guns being adopted.
The way I have been playing Jutland, I have found the armoured cruisers difficult to extract when battlecruisers appear on the scene. Thus they have been withdrawn from my reconnaissance screen and despatched for patrolling duties in the blockade. I find that I am constantly wishing for more light cruisers as they are so versatile.
If I personally was procuring warships in this period, I would be emphasising an increase in the construction of light cruisers and protection/armour in my Battleships. I am not entirely convinced that contemporary navies and politicians would have gone down this route though; if for no other reason that they did not have a copy of Jutland to play!!!!

 

[saddletank]

As well as the theory and watching trends in other navies, each maritime nation built the ships it thought it needed. Thus Britain was always looking for the elusive perfect commerce protection cruiser that had to be roomy, an excellent sea boat, carry medium weight artillery, have a nice big wardroom so foreign dignitaries could be given dinner when visiting your mates or courting would-be mates and be reasonably fast. Such a ship was completely un-necessary to Tirpitz who needed small fast cruisers to work at a short range with the fleet and other cruisers to go out and cause mayhem in the shipping lanes in time of war. In the event the 'best' solution to that requirement was the armed merchant raider and the submarine. I put 'best' in inverted commas there because while submarine warfare was very efficient it tended to annoy neutrals and so in the long run may have been a very bad idea. Often the main value of sending out CLs or ACs to hunt cargo ships was they they drew a whole bunch of RN ships after them like moths - ships better used elsewhere.

The Cavendish design was really a big Carysfort and in appearance looked a lot like a giant V class destroyer. 7.5" guns were reintroduced after over a decade of having 4" and then 6" guns on small cruisers and I personally feel that had WWI not happened then Britain may well have ended up in the 1920s with a squadron of super-Cavendishes armed with 9.2" guns and having speeds of around 30 knots with very little armour. It was the logical extension of where small and medium cruiser design was heading in the Royal Navy and was certainly a more economical way to police her vast empire than fewer more expensive BCs.

I think Uproarious and Outrageous were just an aberration - the deranged outpourings of one old man's mind who while he was a fantastic administrator should have been reigned in by their Lordships years earlier. I do not see those ship types as cost effective or useful. Unless you need some small fast carriers and one final battleship years down the line.

Going back to BHs point about my suggestion that ACs are great in a screen, the logical response to such a situation is not to build BC type ships at all, but to build faster ACs (aka Treaty Cruisers). Cheaper so you can build more and they will be able to outscout said slower ACs or at least maintain a stand off. To respond with a BC design is surely to crack a nut with a hammer: very expensive overkill.

Without WWI the aircraft carrier would have come into its own by the 1930s or 1940s anyway so large fleets of manoeuvring battleships slugging it out toe to toe would be a thing of the past. At that point I think smaller scouting cruisers may have been re-introduced plus air defence vessels to protect CVs.

 

[martin worsey]

have a nice big wardroom so foreign dignitaries could be given dinner when visiting your mates or courting would-be mates
Without WWI the aircraft carrier would have come into its own by the 1930s or 1940s anyway so large fleets of manoeuvring battleships slugging it out toe to toe would be a thing of the past. At that point I think smaller scouting cruisers may have been re-introduced plus air defence vessels to protect CVs.

This is probably one of the most significant aspects in warship development. A large warship represented a HUGE investment of national resource. At times, Britain and Germany were spending over 20% of their annual tax income on warship building programmes and this is on top of other defence expenditure. National pride and prestige is not really significant in the modern world but it was 100 years ago. Decorated in bunting, capital ships were significant symbols both to ones own civilian population and to foreign powers (mates, potential mates and would be potential non-mates).
My own view is that maritime aviation would possibly have been much less significant without Washington; carriers were quite small at the end of the Great War and not really capable of carrying powerful aircraft. In the trade off, Britain was allowed to build the two Nelsons to redress the balance of modern battleships whilst USA and Japan were allowed to convert 2 battlecruisers to redress the balance in carriers. Consequently, they pre built fleet carriers before suitable aircraft were available to operate from them; naval aviation thus developed in USA and Japan in response to the available carriers rather than visa versa. Classic chicken and egg.
If matters had developed naturally, there would be an opportunity to build carriers in response to aircraft development, which would then be affected by long development and building times. It would also prompt debate as it would divert resources from battleship construction. Contemporary wisdom in 1941 was that war in the Pacific would be decided by battlefleets; it was probably only the sinking of PoW and Repulse that suggested that naval warfare had changed and Midway that confirmed it.
Thinking about it, without WW1, aircraft themselves would probably have developed much more slowly. Just think of the amount that aircraft developed in four short years during the Great War; would this have happened in peace time?

 

[saddletank]

Yes... when I wrote that about naval aviation in the 30s being at the same sort of stage without WWI I realised I was probably talking rubbish.

In a world without a WWI, aviation technology by 1940 might even have been where it was in the real post-WWI world of 1920. Now there's a sobering thought on what a Great War starting in the 1940s or 1950s would have been like (think of things like no tanks either, or just very primitive ones just setting out from the agricultural tractor stage as they had in 1915).

But the pre-1914 arms race just was not economically sustainable was it? Britain and Germany were bankrupting themselves... so a 1930s or 1940s North Sea war might still have seen fleets eking out their numbers with Neptunes and Orions and Posen classes having undergone rebuilds and with added modern fire control and with Argus and Hermes style carriers.

Something like the technology assumed in America's WPO scenario.

A computer game based on the politics and economics of the day with restricted technology (assuming no WWI) and a ship design and construction routine that lets you make treaties, plan empires, manage taxes, shift politics then build fleets and fight wars but based solidly on a 1930s and 1940s Europe without Versailles, Stalin and Hitler would be quite an interesting game.