Most underrated battleship/battlecruiser?

That would be the Alaskas. The Americans weren't even prepared to call them battlecruisers, described them as heavy cruisers, you don't get much more underated than that.

Probably a side effect of Hood going sky high.

 

not exactly. they weren't rated as heavy cruisers, but as large cruisers. if the three british kabooms at jutland didn't discourage the americans from rating the lexingtons as battlecruisers, i doubt hood had any effect.
the alaskas were genuinely poor, so i wouldn't say they're underrated.

 

That's interesting, since I read that the ALASKA-class ships were actually quite popular with their crews. Why do you have so low an opinion of them?

 

my main complaint is with their vulnerability to torpedoes. they lacked a torpedo defense system, and they weren't well subdivided. i can't think of any other like-sized usn warship from this period that lacked a tds. yorktown managed it in a fraction of the size. if you look at friedman, you can see that designers did include a tds at various points in the ship's gestation, so someone must've consciously decided to eliminate it.
apart from that, you have a ship twice as large as a baltimore but carrying the same twelve 5in battery. for carrier escort, you'd do better just to build two baltimores.
the main battery and armor were okay.

 

Any idea on why they ditched the torpedo defense systems?

 

no, but i'd pay good money to learn.

 

Agree, the most-underated battlecruiser of WWII is Dunkerque.
Great speed and protection, packed a heavier punch than the Scharnhorst. Firepower probably only second to the Kongo and Hood.

 

So you would consider DUNKERQUE and her sisters to be the best overall ships of the battlecruiser type?

 

No, because Dunkerque was a battleship.
I think it's difficult to make any BB-BC distinction for ships after the Washington Treaty. Nelson was purely a battleship, but all the others were hybrids of BB and BC features. The only ships that show the imbalance associated with battlecruisers were incomplete projects like O-P-Q and Kronshtadt.

 

How about prior to WT?
If I remember correctly, you consider HMS Hood as first hybrid of BB and BC (hence, fast battleship). But how about those german battlecruisers, especially Derfflinger class? Relatively fast and well protected.
And japanese Nagatos? Definitely battleships but with quite high speed for BB.
Should we consider these ships as "fast battleships"?

 

The distinction between BB and BC, in the period when it was a valid distinction, is not simply a matter of protection and speed. The armament on the German battlecruisers was truly feeble. The Derfflingers entered service with their eight 12in guns at the same time the QE's were commissioning with eight 15in guns.
I wouldn't have any trouble with considering Nagato a fast battleship of the hybrid sort. In context with Hood, she sits more on the BB side of things--she is slower (BB), smaller (BB), more powerfully armed (BB), but less thickly armored (BC, the exception).
All these ships like somewhere on a spectrum, or perhaps on mulitple spectra. The "fast battleship" or "armored battlecruiser" is so near the middle that it gets futile trying to assign it to one side.

 

Only reason for me to add Derfflinger -class to that "fast battleship" -list was the fact that Scharnhorsts had even feeblier armament and they are considered (atleast by me) as battleship.

But yes, I agree with that spectrum-thingie. Its quite hard (and sometimes useless waste of time) to label certain ships as battleships, battlecruisers, heavy cruisers etc.

 

That's a good point. You'll note that weaponry standards went way down with the advent of the fast battleships; there are several ships in the 40,000-ton neighborhood armed with eight 15in guns, like 27,000-ton ships of WWI.

 

So do you consider the KONGO-class ships BBs or BCs?

 

As built: BC. As rebuilt: Fast capital ships

 

Was their armor upgraded that much?

 

They continued to have the 199mm belt--it's hard to get past that. The barbettes gained 3in additions. The decks were increased, but especially over the machinery, the improvement was mediocre.

 

The belt was 199mm? But that's, what, seven or eight inches? Not very impressive for a BB.

 

I don't know why the Japanese never replaced their 8in belts. It was illegal to do so under the Washington Treaty, but then, so was increasing the barbette armor. None of the Japanese capital ships got thicker belt armor.

 

Evidently we have a case of weird design and modernisation priorities in the IJN, at least as far as their capital ships are concerned. :-?