WW1 and WW2 Never Built Warship Designs

that_person said:
I find it really sad that posting screenshots from World of Warships has become acceptable “research” on this forum.
Click to expand...
I'm not using the WOWS screenshots for research since most of the "new" ships/designs I found were from Wikipedia, Spring Styles, Warship Projects, Shipbucket, Deviantart and other Secret Naval Projects forums. After finding most of the Secret Naval Projects forums are about post-WW2 designs, I decided to create a new forum. I was using WOWS screenshots to show the bunch of crappy ships WG has been coming up with lately like the Pan-Asian wish.com Yamato and the up-tiered Florida (Project XVI battleship) or to compare designs like the Weimar Republic's 1928 cruiser killer to an in-game ship like the Admiral Schröder.

Here are examples of "new" ships/designs I found from Wikipedia, Spring Styles, Warship Projects, Shipbucket, Deviantart and other Secret Naval Projects forums:

German:
Type 1945 destroyer
P-class cruisers
M-class cruisers
K-class cruisers
L21a design battleship

U.S.:
North Carolina class battleship preliminaries like Project XVI, Scheme A and C
Light cruiser design S-511-2
Light cruiser design S-511-53-A
Light cruiser design S-511-19
USS Northampton (CLC-1)
Design S-511-51 Scheme B-VII destroyer
Heavy cruiser study 1938 (12" gun proposal)
Iowa class battleship aircraft carrier conversion
Preliminary carrier design S-584-201

Italy:
Ansaldo destroyer design 1939
Light cruiser design XII-152
Design 1928 battlecruiser
Design 1933 battlecruiser
Design 45367 battlecruiser
Fernando Cassone's 1921 battlecruiser design

Japan:
Yamato preliminary designs like A-140I and A-140B2
Fuso class battleship preliminary designs like A-57 and A-54
Number 13 battleship preliminary designs like designs D, O and L
Myōkō preliminary designs like C-42

Spain:
Design 138B heavy cruiser

British:
Lion class battleship preliminaries like design 16E-38 and 14B
M3 battleship design
Design B of the 1939 heavy cruiser designs
1939 DNC large cruiser design

Swedish:
Tre Kronor class

Dutch:
Gerard Callenburg class

Soviet:
Project X cruiser
MK 130 mm gun light cruiser designs

Pan-America:
20 de Julio
Acre class
Mendoza class
Marcílio Diaz class
Design 1124a for Venezuela
Design 1124b for Venezuela

Export:
Ansaldo UP90Bis cruiser for Romania
Vickers design 767 light cruiser for the Dutch
Royal Cockatoo yard heavy cruiser for Australia
DNC heavy cruiser design for Greece
Vickers 1904 design for Chile
Vickers Design 758A for Argentina
Vickers 1957 Design for Venezuela
 
Last edited:
Godzilla37 said:
Any WW2 cruiser designs for Italy, Germany and France?
Click to expand...
German cruiser designs are pretty limited. For WWI, you have the Flottenkreuzer series as one of the biggest examples I can recall at this time. Pre-war you have the Emden preliminary design (4x2 15cm) and its subsequent modernization proposals. You also have the 1926 I/10 "treaty cruiser" sketch. There is also the Kreuzer Q sub-series (of Kreuzer M) and the briefly-existing all-steam initial Kreuzer M pitch as well as the later 17cm armament proposal. Similarly, the Admiral Hipper's early development included the possibility of a 19cm armament and there was some differences between the early plans and what would eventually be built. Also of note is the Kreuzeren K and L (Seydlitz and Lutzow) which had alternative propulsion plant arrangements and, of course, the triple 15cm/55 armament before being changed to 20.3cm/60. You also have the private yard pitches from yards such as Schichau which would yield designs such as Motorkreuzer 1938 (with varying plant proposals) and the rather spectacularly named "Trotz Alledem". From Schichau we have "Amtsentwurf 1938" - possibly a fake design, but I believe it to be real.
From the "iffy" end of "cruisers" we have the Spahkreuzer series (1938, 1939, and 1940) and the O-class. While the O-class if officially listed as battleships, they are more equivalent to large cruisers or "unrestricted cruisers" (a term, later classification, that died out due to the emergence of carrier air power before it could gain any traction). I also believe the later "Handelzerstorer" and prior designs (I/M26, I/26, D-lands, Kreuzer P Entwurf AV, Scheme 1/2, Kreuzer P Entwurf O, etc) could fall under the term "heavy cruiser" (as the D-lands would become).
Kriegsmarine cruiser development, due to the short existence of the 3R, was rather sparse compared to that of other nations.
 
I think any thread or concept based on the principle of coming up with realistic designs for WG to use in WoWs, in 2024, is simply dead on arrival.

This kind of thing has been done for a long time, from very early on in the game's history. The Forums used to be full of such things before they were purged, nevermind older sections of the forum purged long before they were shut down.

The WG team does not care, and has not for years. They freely make up designs to fit whatever gimmick they decide a particular nation's ship line is going to use and have not cared about sticking to realistic designs for half a decade or more. Their choice on what ships to include are driven by gameplay, and specifically high tier gameplay, because this is where players spending money is more profitable relative to the resources it takes to design and playtest a ship.
 
Phoenix_jz said:
The WG team does not care, and has not for years. They freely make up designs to fit whatever gimmick they decide a particular nation's ship line is going to use and have not cared about sticking to realistic designs for half a decade or more. Their choice on what ships to include are driven by gameplay, and specifically high tier gameplay, because this is where players spending money is more profitable relative to the resources it takes to design and playtest a ship.
Click to expand...
Until November 2022 they did care about realistic designs somewhat. After the devblog of the South American cruiser line which there was a lot of drama because they ignored the South American CCs techline proposal and the multiple requests by CCs and players alike to remove WG's South American "would have"/"could have" techline. The recent French DD line that recently went into early access is mostly realistic but yes it's beginning to seem more recently that WG only cares about making up techlines to fit whatever gimmick they decide for a particular nation. Most of the realistic ships and designs are being released as premiums nowadays so players are forced to spend a lot of money/gold/doubloons to get said ship. I really think it's honestly so funny that non-game developers can easily come up with realistic ships and techlines, unlike WG. WG is beginning to care more about the betterment of the company and not the game or its players by showing what designs they have released so far and if they continue down this current path (which they most likely will if they continue to ignore the CCs' and players requests for more realistic techlines) they will continue to lose players and the game will eventually be beyond saving.
Proposed South American Cruiser Line
WG's South American Cruiser Line
 
Godzilla37 said:
Until November 2022 they did care about realistic designs somewhat.
Click to expand...

Friend, I have been involved with that game since the Closed Beta Test.

Trust me when I tell you wheels were were coming off the 'realism' selling point long before that. Early on there were reasonable excuses but starting with the British battleship line in 2017 it became clear that WG was more than willing to throw realism aside for the sake of whatever gameplay concerns or particular line gimmick they wanted to be running with. Most of what is running around at tier IX and X is fake for all but a handful of navies, or at best heavily modified versions of designs that only existed on paper. The French have had this issue, the Italians suffer from it heavily, as has the American battleship split, a not inconsiderable number of German ships, and I haven't even checked through the Spanish or Dutch lines because I had stopped paying close attention to the game by that point (once upon a time I ran a series on the forum that actually tracked all this stuff).

WG has frequently made complete butcheries of design fittings, from likely AA armament to superstructure designs and fire control systems, and in fact have removed many of the older historically accurate configuration hulls from many of the tech tree ships. It wasn't great before 2019, but it only got worse since then.

If WG had pretended to care by the end of the decade even half as much as they did in the mid-2010s, I might have actually stuck with playing the game for a couple years longer.

And they fundamentally don't care. The game is about making money - which is fine by itself, such is the case with any product. But the problem here is that WG is motivated to create high tier products - it does not take a meaningfully greater amount of time and resources to model, develop, playtest, and release a tier X ship versus a tier V... but you can sell a tier X for 4.5x the price. And the high tier ships - especially tier IX and X - is where most of the fake ships are, because most navies never designed gun and torpedo based warships that can actually compete with the few real ships at that tier - ex, Des Moines being vastly more powerful than any other gun based cruiser that entered service with any navy historically (and most did not even design cruisers that could compete with it), and likewise Yamato being more powerful than even the most potent battleship designs considered by most navies.

This was less of an issue early in the game's history, because WG only ever had to worry about making a handful of fake ships - or heavy bastardizations of existing designs - to cap off tech trees. Because there were no premium ships past tier VIII. This kept things grounded for a while. Then they changed that, because they were following the money, and things steadily spiraled from there.

Trust me when I tell you that players have been banging on the historical accuracy drum for almost decade. WG has only cared less and less over time, because, to be perfectly frank - the people like us who care about it are a tiny minority. We're not the ones that keep the game alive. It's the average "I like this arcade ship game that lets me shoot ships in my ship" player who wants to scratch the ship itch the way they may want to scratch the tank itch or the plane itch, and gameplay will always matter more to them - and thus to WG - than the historical accuracy of their ships, so long as they see at least a few names they recognize. And when you really want to print money, do an anime collab. The people who cared about historical accuracy on the forums and subreddit were always a minority there, and the players actually using said forums and subreddit were always a small minority of the player base too. It just doesn't matter that much to WG, and it hasn't since very early on in the game's history.

I say this not to be mean spirited, but just as a warning. As someone who used to put in this kind of effort - it's not worth it, or at least not for WG & WoWs. All you will do is set yourself up for disappointment and burn yourself out - especially now that the game has been out for long enough that they've exhausted most of the major naval power's ability to provide new and distinctive ships to out into the game. The 'fake ships to keep selling content' will only continue to get worse, just as many of the minor nations or multinational nation tech trees and premiums of the 2020s were an escalation of this problem versus what was going on in the late 2010s (which already had many of us in an uproar then..

Players have been throwing line and ships suggestions out for a decade now. It has not stopped WG from doing what they've done.

I'll always encourage people to go and look into the lesser known designs of nations that never made it into service. They're fascinating. But do it because you're interested in learning more about them. Don't do it for World of Warships. Unfortunately, it's just futile.
 
I recall the Alpha/Beta days on the Forum pretty well. There was a big air of promise for the game in the 2013-2015 period, and although I did not spend nearly as much time on the "historical" side of things (as SeaKitty, spending my time in the various anime chat threads) I do very much remember the tech tree proposal threads from a few dedicated members such as yourself and Demon93IT. If memory serves, there was an entire subsection dedicated to proposals within the historical section.
A lot of time and work went into those with the expectation that they would at least be given some recognition and, in a perfect world, perhaps even generally adhered to. One shouldn't sneeze at or ignore the work of a group of very passionate enthusiasts because they are the most driven and accurate in their area of expertise.
Yet, as the years passed, that's exactly what happened. It gained in popularity and alienated its original fanbase as it chased whatever made the line go up. It's been rather sad to see how the game has developed, and I don't even play it more than once a month or so (if that!).
In more recent years, as I've better come to understand the Kriegsmarine, it's just sad to look at the current state of the German tech tree. I remember feeling physically ill when the German destroyer line split came in January of 2021 as I had been working on a triple destroyer line proposal. It had gone over 55 pages and 10,000 words on Google Docs - and I had just made it to the premiums. The split, naturally, turned out god-awful. I believe I can somewhat imagine what it must have been like to see the butchering done to a lot of the Italian ships and designs. Wasted potential. Wasted hope. Wasted time.
I still have a lot of your Italian line proposals saved to my phone somewhere.
For those curious, the problem isn't that the game is not realistic, but that it doesn't even remotely try to be faithful to the ships themselves in the slightest. What's to separate the game from a completely fictional boat battle arcade game? Nothing more than a few rough 3D models and the ship name in now only a few cases, but that's about it. The rot increases by the patch.
So I agree wholeheartedly that it's practically pointless - unless, of course, it simply gives you an excuse to conduct further research, as it has for me. The building of a complete German tech tree (which I have since completed!) has definitely provided the motivation to search and dig far and wide to see what all I could find. Nowadays I'm a bit of a self-starter, but it was a useful thing in the beginning. I'm rather proud of where I am now though, despite the pervasive KM hate and personal spite I receive for it.

I wonder if there's ever going to be a WW2 naval game we can once again rally behind. WTNF was looking like it for a brief moment, but the execution was so unfortunately poor. One day, maybe.
 

Similar threads

Back
Top Bottom