Golden Journal No. 38:
Alternative Dreadnoughts
Publisher’s Preview
by Mike Bennighof, Ph.D.
April 2024

While the British battleship Dreadnought represented a great leap forward in terms of naval technology, she was a compromise design and by no means the sole brainchild of First Sea Lord Sir John Fisher. The Director of Naval Construction and his staff presented many alternatives to Fisher and his Committee on Designs before they settled on the ship that became Dreadnought.

That’s the background of Golden Journal No. 38: Alternative Dreadnoughts. The Golden Journal is our little magazine-like rag that we publish whenever we feel like it. It’s actually a pretty nice publication; the booklet part is printed just the same as our books (it’s actually physically the same as Campaign Studies like Coral Sea; Defending Australia) and inside that book we include a small sheet of playing pieces. Real, die-cut and silky-smooth pieces just like we put in our games.

Alternative Dreadnoughts has twenty of them, four each (named Dreadnought, Superb, Bellerophon and Temeraire in every quartet, just like the first four ships built to the actual, accepted design) of five different proposed designs.

This is why I love the Golden Journal. Wargames are not works of history, and in no way equivalent to an academic study of a topic. But they can be a really useful tool for asking historical questions or looking at alternatives. The British Admiralty never considered sticking with the tried-and-true pre-dreadnought battleship pattern for its 1906 ship; already with the Lord Nelson class they had departed from the prior pattern and even the King Edward VII class that came before that had started to edge away. With or without Jackie Fisher, there would have been a new type of battleship.

The first three alternatives are derived from the basic Lord Nelson design, with the same hull and the by-now-traditional triple-expansion engines. So they’re just as slow as the other pre-dreadnoughts of the British battle line, but they have more firepower. They also have the same armor scheme, which very soon will not be adequate in the age
of the Dreadnought – even these much weaker Dreadnoughts.

As built, Lord Nelson carried four 12-inch guns and ten 9.2-inch guns; the high rate of fire of the latter was seen as a potentially decisive attribute. But the British 9.2-inch gun was a crapulent weapon (one approved by Fisher in an earlier stint overseeing ordnance), and the ships did not offer a great increase in fighting power over the previous class of pre-dreadnoughts.

The first Dreadnought variation is a Lord Nelson armed with no 12-inch or 9.2-inch guns, but instead sixteen 10-inch guns. The 10-inch gun did not yet exist when the Director of Naval Construction presented this design, but
it was expected to fire a much heavier shell than the 9.2-inch gun with a rate of fire not much less. In game terms it has primary range but limited penetration possibilities. Can sheer volume overcome striking power? Well, we gave you the pieces and scenarios to find out.

The next version is very similar to Lord Nelson, with the twin 9.2-inch turrets at the “corner” positions replaced with single mounts for 12-inch guns, and the two single 9.2-inch turrets removed. It’s possible that this ship is, somehow, an even worse fighting ship than the original Lord Nelson, but once again, you can try this out for yourself.

The final improved Lord Nelson is an enlarged ship, with twin rather than single mounts in the corner positions. That gives her a dozen 12-inch guns, which is actually more than the real Dreadnought, but the inefficient layout means that only eight of them can fire on a broadside. She’s a more capable fighting ship than the other two but she’s still painfully slow. She didn’t satisfy Fisher or his Committee, and you can see why.

Fisher wanted speed not just for tactical reasons, but to allow faster deployment. Faster ships could cover more commitments which in turn meant fewer ships would be needed and thus cost savings would be achieved. The last two variations achieve that speed by using turbines instead of triple-expansion engines (just like the real Dreadnought) on a hull similar to that used for the version actually selected.

Turbines had another design effect beyond greater horsepower to deliver that greater speed; they also took up less internal space and did so in a more efficient manner. That allowed the main gun turrets and their armored barbettes to be placed along the centerline of the ship. Since the barbette went all the way to the bottom of the ship, they could not be placed atop the engine spaces.

The proposed “castle” designs took this to the maximum. The larger, more radical version stacked three turrets forward, one above the other, and three aft. The slightly less radical alternative just put one turret forward, but stacked three of them aft. The Committee feared that the shock of the upper turrets’ guns firing would knock out or even kill the gun crews of the lower turrets, and so they rejected both of these designs. Testing (which had not even begun when these ships were drafted) would show this fear to be overblown, but the Committee played it safe (probably wisely) and the Dreadnought design actually selected did not require any super-firing (firing one turret’s guns over another).

There are 11 scenarios in Alternative Dreadnoughts, which I think is the most we’ve put in a Golden Journal but I wanted all five Dreadnought variations to have a chance to fight somebody. All of them are Battle Scenarios, to bring you right into the action; since the purpose here is to play with the new battleship pieces, I dispensed with Operational Scenarios for them since in those it’s never guaranteed that surface action will take place at all, let alone with the shiny new Dreadnought pieces. In nine of them the new Dreadnought fight the Germans, and in the others they fight the Dutch. Jutland has a whole fleet of planned but never built Dutch dreadnoughts that get very little love in the core game’s scenarios, so this seemed like a good opportunity to get them some time on the table.

And that’s Golden Journal No. 38: Alternative Dreadnoughts. Harry Bryan likes it, so you know it has to be good.

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Mike Bennighof is president of Avalanche Press and holds a doctorate in history from Emory University. A Fulbright Scholar and NASA Journalist in Space finalist, he has published a great many books, games and articles on historical subjects; people are saying that some of them are actually good. He lives in Birmingham, Alabama with his wife, three children, and his Iron Dog, Leopold.

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