Maximum battleship The " maximum battleships " , also known as the " Tillman Battleships " were a series of World War I - era design studies for extremely large battleship s , 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 itself 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 1912 – 1913 , 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 Navy ' s 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 classes , the " maximum battleships " were designed with a continuous flush main deck . Most battleships in this era had a long forecastle deck . Secondly , the Tillman designs all included five casemate guns mounted aft , two on each side and one at the tip of the stern . Similar " stern chasers " had been previously mounted in the , but were omitted from the . These casemates were a return to an older design idea ; American battleship designers had abandoned hull - mounted casemates after the . They had transpired to be too " wet " – heavy seas rendered them unusable — and they had been removed from all earlier classes . However , the casemates on the " maximum battleships " would have been higher above the waterline than they had been on earlier designs , so it is possible that their huge size and flush decks would have provided enough freeboard astern to keep the casemates dry . The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 limited naval armaments , causing the cancellation of the battleships and halting all consideration of the " maximum battleships . "