Pyotr Velikiy

History

Under the Naval Warfare Development Program of 1909-1919, worked out by the Naval General Staff (MGSh) in the second half of 1907, in addition to the eight battleships, it was proposed that four more ships should be built with the intention of using T-crossing tactics against an enemy fleet. On August 18, 1907, MGSh came up with the principal characteristics for the future "armored cruiser", which was expected to run at a speed of 25 knots; carry eight 305 mm guns placed in four turrets and sixteen 102 mm guns; and have a main armor belt of at least 152 mm. By 1909, these characteristics had been slightly adjusted upwards, but when MGSh's senior ranks paid a visit to German shipyards and learned about the all-new battlecruisers under construction at that time, an image of the necessary performance characteristics started to finally take shape. The ship should have a speed of at least 28 knots, carry ten to twelve 305 mm or 356 mm guns, and have an armor belt of at least 190 mm. On August 26, 1911 six Russian and seventeen foreign shipyards received an invitation from the Navy Ministry to join a competition to create the best outline design for an "armored cruiser for the Baltic Sea." Outline designs were submitted by John Brown; Vickers and William Beardmore (Great Britain); Vulkan and Blohm und Voss (Germany), who submitted theirs jointly with Putilov Works; and by the national Admiralty, Baltic and Putilov Works. On May 12, 1912, the results were summed up, with the winner being outline design No.6 of the Admiralty Shipyard, which was later used as the basis for battlecruiser Izmail.

Variant X of Project 707, designed by the Blohm und Voss firm for the "Armored Cruiser for the Baltic Sea" competition, provided for a distinctive ship layout, as Variants VIII to X envisaged a superfiring arrangement, over the non-superfiring variety, for the ship's main battery guns. With a normal displacement of 30,378 tons, the ship was to carry eight 356 mm guns in four turrets and twenty-four 130 mm secondary battery guns in casemates. In general, by design the ship was quite reminiscent of the German battlecruisers of her time, while in terms of armor protection she was seemingly closer to the Gangut-class battleships.

Design