  the "maximum battleships", also known as the "tillman battleships" were a series of world war i-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 to the order of senator "pitchfork" benjamin tillman by the bureau of construction and repair (c&r) of the united states navy. the navy was not interested in the designs and drew them up to win support from the committee on naval affairs, on which tillman sat. nevertheless, they helped influence design work on the  and first south dakota classes of battleships. the plans prepared for the senator were preserved by c&r in the first of its "spring styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925. senator tillman had grown impatient with the navy's requests for larger battleships every year as well as the navy's habit of building battleships significantly larger than congress authorized. he accordingly instructed the navy to design "maximum battleships", the largest battleships that they could use. the only limits on the potential size of an american battleship were the dimensions of the locks of the panama canal. the locks measure roughly , and so the "maximum battleships" were . draft was limited to . ==designs== tillman's first request, in 1912â1913, was never completed, and though the studies it involved had some influence on the design of the pennsylvania class of battleships, that class was essentially just an enlargement of the preceding . in 1916, he repeated his request, and this time the bureau of construction and repair produced a series of design studies, which again had some influence on the design of the next class of battleships, in this case the s, an enlargement of the previous . after the first four design studies were complete, design iv was chosen for further development and three additional studies, iv-1, iv-2, and iv-3, were prepared. at the request of secretary of the navy josephus daniels, these designs used  guns instead of the , 50-caliber guns used in the earlier studies. the navy decided that design iv-2 was the most practical (or perhaps the least impractical) and presented it to congress early in 1917. these designs differed from the battleships being built in two significant ways beyond just their size. firstly, unlike preceding
Abandoned_military_projects_of_the_United_States Battleships Battleships_of_the_United_States_Navy World_War_I_battleships_of_the_United_States