The World Today

The World Today
Earth in 2013

Sunday, August 29, 2010

King Maurice I class BBG

King Maurice I class Guided-missile Battleship

Type: BBG
Manufacturer: Recife Arsenal
Crew: 750
Produced: 2007
Built: 4 planned
Length: 260 m
Power: Gas Turbine
Range: 11,000 km
Armaments: 2 x 2 200mm chain gun turret
4 x 1 20mm PDS
30 X 4 VLS (40 multipurpose, 40 anti-ship, 40 anti-sub)
40 x 4 VLS (anti-air)
Speed: 50 kps
Cost: 1 bin Guilders
Ships: King Maurice I, Prinz van Oranje, Queen Beatrix, Empress of Brazil

The King Maurice I class battleships are the second generation of guided missile battleships. It is also the first class to employ the expensive 200mm chain guns. These are half the size of older battleships guns, but make up for that by firing between 60 and 100 rounds per minute, either of high explosive or armor-piercing sabot. These multi-barrel chain guns are also why each BBG will cost slightly over one billion Guilders. The missile compliment of the BBG consists of 160 SAMs, 40 ASMs, 40 Anti-sub, and 40 MPM. The multi-purpose missile have no moving parts in the warhead. Instead, the tip of the missile carries several tungsten darts, that will slam into their targets at hypersonic speeds, punching through aircraft, armor and concrete, destroying with kinetic energy.


The BBG is designed for naval supremacy and not short bombardment. The MPMs and shells from the chain gun can destroy land-based targets, but this would only be after naval threats were eliminated, and in support of cruisers equipped with ground attack missiles, or the future Arsenal Ships that are planned to be built by 2020. The new class of BBG is also highly automated, requiring fewer crew to man them.

2 comments:

  1. This is quite an interesting design, but i had a few thoughts while looking over it's specifications. I noticed that it uses the unused hull classification of a guided missile battleship, it does not seem to be in it'self a battleship. While it's missile armament is comparable to the first 4 Ohio class SSBNs that where later converted to SSGNs, it's gun armament is not that much bigger than the 5 inchers used as secondary batteries on the Iowa class battleship, and as primaries on the Arleigh Burke class destroyers and the modern Ticonderoga class cruisers. And since part of the definition of a battleship is it's heavy naval guns, and the 7.8 inch guns aren't all that heavy, I was wondering if this was an over site or if battleships has received a definition change in your timeline.

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    1. It's been a while since I thought about these old designs. They are leftovers from the first incarnation of An Alternate History of the Netherlands. A couple of rewrites leaves the third (and published) edition unrecognizable compared to earlier drafts. Anyway, the smaller guns are rapid-fire rotary cannons. I think I had it at sixty rounds a minute, and given that they are two hundred millimeter rounds, it's going to leave a mark. It's more of a close-in thing, shore bombardment, erasing fortifications and the like.

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