Talk:General Discussion/@comment-5046483-20141104221921/@comment-79.98.35.23-20141107042346

As Queek has said, functionally a battlecruiser is the same as a fast battleship. During WWII and the interwar period the advances in engine technology made battleships faster and so able to match battlecruisers' speed while those same advances were used to allow battlecruisers to carry heavier armour to match the armour thickness of battleships; the designs converged on creating a ship with the benefits of both a battlecruiser and a battleship. The distinction was far more relevant in the WWI era where ships had to make tradeoffs between speed and armour due to the poor engines of the time.

Ultimately the distinction comes down to how the ship is to be used, whether it will be used like a battleship that is capable of high speeds or whether it will be used like an oversized cruiser. An interesting point here is the Admiral-class battlecruisers (of which only HMS Hood was ever built) were originally designed as battleships but got reclassified as battlecruisers without a single design change simply because the admiralty had enough high-end battleships but needed some battlecruisers to function as command ships for their cruiser fleets. Ultimately if you ask whether a large. fast, armoured ship with heavy guns is a battleship or a battlecruiser the correct response is "whichever you need it to be" because strategically and tactically it is capable of fulfilling both roles.

I also find it a bit odd that people are using the term BB in this thread (the US hull code for battleships) but using the term BC for battlecruiser rather than the US code for them (which is CC in case you are interested).