Grazhdanskaya Voyna- class Battleship

## Voyna - class

Artist's Impression, Гражда́нская война́

The Grazhdanskaya Voyna-class (Гражда́нская война́) were a proposed class of fast battleships in the Soviet Union. If built, they would have been some of the most heavily armed vessels in the Soviet Navy.

## Background

In 1937, the Soviet Union's capital ship force was best described as "not up to scratch", consisting of only the old Gangut-class battleships. When the Italian Regia Marina announced the Littorio-class battleships, the Soviet Navy decided it was a good time to begin developing modern classes of battleships.

The final decision was made to acquire designs for a fast battleship or battlecruiser of up to 28500 tons normal displacement that would be competitive against the Japanese Kongo, French Dunkerque or German Scharnhorst classes. A request for such vessels was passed to the #history Central Admiralty and Design Bureau. One of these designs represented the heavily armed Voyna-class.

## Design

The Voyna-class was designed with the industrial and logistical limitations of the Soviet Union in mind, using older or already-existent weapons and machinery, with limited maximum armor thickness. The ships were to have been 205m long overall with a beam of up to 30m and a draft of 8.6m at maximum load. Mixed coal and oil firing boilers and 3 geared shafts would have propelled the vessels to a top speed of 28.03 knots. The planned range was 6500 nautical miles at 14 knots.

Armour was limited to a thickness of 230mm, and the main belt and conning tower were protected accordingly. The ships would have had an incremental armor scheme, with end belts of 30m length thinning to 50mm and an upper belt of average thickness 50mm protecting the whole freeboard to the main belt. The ships had a full length armored deck thinning from total thickness 100mm to 50mm at the ends. This protection scheme was, in practice, quite outdated, but gave the ship good protected volume. The main battery turrets had actually existent protection, with 230mm barbettes, proving the mistakes of the Imperial Russian Era like the notorious Borodino or Tret'chasa of explosive personality were not repeated, but the gunhouses themselves were of limited protection with 203mm (8 inch) thick faces and 76mm (3 inch) roofs and sides.

Armament wise, the ships would have carried an impressive main battery of 15 30.5cm/52 Pattern 1913 guns in 5 turrets salvaged from the lost Imperatritsa Mariya-class. With a rate of fire of 3 rounds per minute this would allowed the vessels to rain walls of over 21000 kilograms of Soviet Steel per minute on Gulag-worthy opponents, although this rate of fire would have been reduced in actual practice. The secondary battery consisted of 16 single 130mm/50 B13 Pattern 1936 guns, in mounts not unlike those used on the Leningrad-class destroyers, along with 8 twin 76.2mm dual purpose guns. A design oversight, possibly influenced by excessive Vodka, meant that the vessels did not have the deck space to comfortably fit this heavy secondary battery without obstructing the main battery- This was resolved by simply stacking the weapons on a multi-tiered superstructure that made full use of the ship's wide beam.

## Cancellation

Although the comically dense shell rain these vessels could create was highly amusing, the class was eventually cancelled due its design issues.