Battle-cruisers

The United States laid down six battle-cruisers in 1920-1, but these were cancelled as a result of the Washington naval treaty, and the first American battle-cruisers - large cruisers in US Navy parlance - were not completed until late in the Second World War. France built two battle-cruisers in the 1930s. 

The figure of eight includes a battle-cruiser for Australia but not three battleships built by a British syndicate in Spain. Both Austria-Hungary and Russia ordered British turbines and boilers for their dreadnoughts. 

January 1934 by Hankey and Fisher about the pocket battleships, Chatfield replied that the French (who had laid down the first of two battle-cruisers in 1932) could look after them. He added that Britain s three battle-cruisers could do so too, but ultimately the Royal Navy might not possess any ships of that type as the design of their replacements would depend upon what the Japanese replaced their battlecruisers with. No attempt was made to build larger cruisers to cope with the pocket battleships. Indeed, the Admiralty proposed at the second London naval conference to reduce the maximum size of cruisers, from the 10,000 tons allowed under the Washington treaty to 8,000 tons, to make it possible to build at less cost the number believed to be required to protect British trade. ... 

The war is generally seen as the twilight of the capital ship. Stephen Roskill, in his official history, concluded that the navy had not achieved a proper balance in 1939 between capital ships and aircraft carriers. However, no major navy abandoned the construction of capital ships before the war, and international comparison of capital ships and aircraft carriers launched between 1936 and 1945 (table 4.1) does not suggest that the Royal Navy was unusually conservative. The German navy s Z Plan of January 1939 aimed at having a fleet of six battleships and two battle-cruisers, but only two aircraft carriers, by 1944. In... 

Cumulative totals of dreadnought battleships and battle-cruisers completed at end of ... 

In the next chapter I will examine the art of self-defense—but, of course, on a molecular scale. Just as machine guns, battle cruisers, and nuclear bombs are necessarily sophisticated machines in our larger world, we will see that tiny cellular defense mechanisms are quite complex, too. Few things are simple in Darwin s black box. 

It had taken two days for all of them to fly down from their assembly points at the orbiting asteroids, jockeying into their jump formation under the direction of Emmet Mordden and Luigi Balsmao. The Salvatore was the lead vessel, an ex-New California navy battle cruiser, and now Luigi Balsmao s command ship. 

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