Alsace-class battleship

Common card · No. 269217

The Alsace class was a pair of fast battleships planned by the French Navy in the late 1930s in response to German plans to build two H-class battleships after the Second London Naval Treaty collapsed. The Alsace design was based on variants of the Richelieu class, and three proposals were submitted by the design staff. The proposed armament included nine or twelve 380 mm (15 in) guns or nine 406 mm (16 in) guns, but no choice was definitively made before the program ended in mid-1940. According to one pair of historians, logistical considerations—including the size of the 12-gun variant and the introduction of a new shell caliber for the 406 mm version—led the naval command to settle on the nine 380 mm design. But another pair of authors disagree, believing that the difficulty of designing and manufacturing a three-gun turret would have caused prohibitive delays during wartime, making the third, largest variant the most likely to have been built. The ships would have forced the French...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 fr