Shipbucket

Oh My God. They are just pure beauty!

DG_Alpha wrote:If there was a Bayreuth-class Kiel, what happened to the LST Kiel?

The LST Kiel was lost to a french drifting mine at the channel near Calais in 1945. Kiel was still at sea trials and did a sea lift mission to Calais, heavily loaded with arms, ammo and supplies for the planned invasion.
The LST-class was still the Kiel-class after the accident, the name was given to a new cruiser then.

I reworked some details on Kiel-class LST.

Again we come to the question, what possible reason could Germany have for building such a thing? You're attacking a target that's what? 100nm away at most? Not even the US, who were staging invasions a quarter of the world away from home didn't build anything remotely like it.
What you need are cheap conventional landing crafts of all types, not super expensive one-offs.

Thiel wrote:Again we come to the question, what possible reason could Germany have for building such a thing? You're attacking a target that's what? 100nm away at most? Not even the US, who were staging invasions a quarter of the world away from home didn't build anything remotely like it.
What you need are cheap conventional landing crafts of all types, not super expensive one-offs.

Attacking US, I believe.

Thiel, you are right. Overrunning England with adequate force is easy. There is a big need for hundreds of small ships carrying more tanks, more soldiers and more supplies to a warzone that is max. 100 miles away. A daytrip anyway.
It begins to become interesting with ambushes at Scotland. Or invasions on Ireland. On Iceland. Gibraltar, Malta and so on. England would have been just a beginning. With a success like that the nazis would not have stopped on any target until a hard defeat. (still thank god it's an AU only...). Therefor the 'Kiel' is useful.

US, no. In this AU the US are not engaged in Europe. It's very far-fetched by now, an US engagement would drive it completely impossible.

wait what.....
consider this: the USN fought in the pacific with the 'regular' landing craft, shipped on board (sometimes modified) merchants, and you build this thing which can't even beach in quite a few occasions for the invasion of..... scotland? why would you even invade iceland? invasion of gibraltar? that's an port! just blow away their defences and sail in a few ships full of troops! malta: just destroy their supply and they would give up.

just no.

To me your crane does not look large enough forthe LC on deck.

JLDogg wrote:To me your crane does not look large enough forthe LC on deck.

The LC deflects most of the crane, the crane is large and strong enough for the LC.

I sincerely doubt that. If you want to launch anything that big in any kind of sea you're going to need a proper davit.
Take a look at some of the post war USN LSTs. Notice how big the davits are? They're designed to launch boats less than half the size of your landing craft.
And we're still looking at a purpose for those ships in the first place. All of the targets you've listed are out of reach of existing Kriegsmarine landing crafts like the Marinefährprahm. Heck, they've got enough range to go north of Scotland and attack Belfast from Amsterdam. Iceland can be reached from Bergen, Gibraltar from any point along the French or Italian Mediterranean coast, ditto Malta.