Kriegsmarine 1946, second approach

[SrGopher]

I'm not very big on missile carrying vessels, but these are very fine cruisers!

[emperor_andreas]

I especially like the E-variant. Looking forward to more, especially the evolution of the Panzerschiffen!

-Matt

[Ashley]

Directly imported from germany-navy.de comes the 'Kleiner Flugzeugtraeger' (small aircraft carrier), CVL. But with 6000 tons it's more a CVE, even by its mission.
Here the story from german-navy.de:
While the aircraft carrier Graf Zeppelin was still under construction, the German Naval Construction department started with design studies for other, smaller carrier. Besides as 12000t carrier (of which only very few information is left), a even smaller design - a 6000t ship - was made.

Called "Kleiner Flugzeugträger" - small aircraft carrier, this ship was only able to carry up do 15 aircraft of the size of a fighter aircraft. Without any armor protection and probably a diesel engine system, the ships would not be able to keep up the speed of other Kriegsmarine surface units, so their military used for the Kriegsmarine was very doubtful. They could be compared with the allied CVEs which were used to protect allied convoys in the North Atlantic in the later years of the war, but since the
Kriegsmarine did not depend on such convoys as the allied did, the idea behind this design is questionable.

Only a first design study was made, there were no plans to actually build ships like these.

In KM'46 the ships are useful, due to their speed of 32 kn. With an air wing of 15 Me-109T they gave superior protection for the big ships against air attacks.
The

[Novice]

Interesting design, but the use of only two proppellers is doubtfull. Many of the major units of the Kriegsmarine had 3 shafts. Also I think the after section of the ship is wrong (the water-plane as it is will cause too much drag, and that will result in a considerable speed loss IMHO).

[Biancini1995]

i loved the camo

[klagldsf]

So...they wouldn't have been able to keep up with surface units...but were built because of their 32 knot speed?

And studies have shown that a centerline prop is all but useless anyway due to keel turbulence.

[Thiel]

So...they wouldn't have been able to keep up with surface units...but were built because of their 32 knot speed

Does seem odd.

[emperor_andreas]

Nice work!

-Matt

[Ashley]

Thanks for your comments. I agree, there is much improvement possible. The drawing is based on a loose drawing that led to the drawing on german-navy.de. I just added some minor details to make the design at least working. Now I'll redo it how I think it could have really looked like.

[Ashley]

Now with three shafts, a more usefull flightdeck and rearranged aa. The speed does not seem a problem to me. Length is 160m, weight around 6000 to only, so no armor at all, maybe some on the standard 10,5cm aa turrets.