Talk:Recent Updates/@comment-24782822-20140415111726/@comment-182.5.81.98-20140415160145

Strictly speaking, the HMS Dreadnought was the first optimized all-big-gun battleship to enter service. Optimized in that she was the first BB with 360 degree main gun firing arc which was able to bring every single one of her primary guns to bear on a single target (by broadside). A dreadnought battleship as it was understood when the term was coined was an all-big-gun battleship designed on the same principles as HMS Dreadnought. It's strictly untrue that after Dreadnought all BBs were built like her. Semi-dreadnoughts existed that carried all-big-gun armament but had unoptimized turret arrangements. Settsu, for instance, carried her guns in six turrets with four of the turrets sitting side by side on the hull, making it impossible for her to bring all her guns to bear on the same target. Closer to WW2, the French and Italians even built BBs with turrets only on the front of the ship. While still called dreadnought battleships, they technically failed the classification for not having true 360-degree main gun firing arc.

"Super-dreadnought" was a term coined for what would have been called "treaty busters" when they first appeared. These were ships that exceeded the tonnage limitations imposed by the Washington and London Naval Treaties (35,000 tons). The Yamatos in real history were clearly in this category. The Iowas were also the same, although the US invoked an escalator clause in the latter Treaty to justify their construction. Plus nobody cared about the Treaty system by then anyway. In essence, super-d was just a euphemism for treaty-buster. Technically, the originally-treaty-compliant Nagato and Mutsu became super-ds after their 1930s refit pushed them beyond the agreed 35,000 tons of the Second London Naval Treaty. However, Japan had withdrawn from the Treaty system by then anyway. Kongou and her sisters had the distinction of becoming the world's first super-ds (in the treaty-busting sense) when their late 1920s refit from BCs to BBs, with the badly-planned addition of 4,000 tons of armor, busted the Washington Treaty limitations. Not on the individual ships' displacement, but in that their combined displacement caused Japan to exceed its Treaty allocation. Poor Hiei was almost forced to be scrapped in consequence. Bismarck at her over 50,000-ton full displacement was clearly a super-d.

The original super-dreadnought question I asked was in terms of GAME classifications. The question was: Which ships in the game are classified Super-Ds IN THE GAME? I originally thought the Yamatos were just as they were in real life, but someone said the game just classifies them as BBs. So what ships fall under classification #12?