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I happened to be leafing through 'German Warships of WW1' John C. Taylor ISBN 7110 0099 9 yesterday.

The original 1891 Brandenburg and others of the same class had three centreline 11" turrets with cross-deck firing for the Q position--techs that will not appear until much later for Germany in the game.

While I can see that giving GE these as bonus techs may seriously unbalance the early game, perhaps the initial build should allow for it? It seems to create other things which are unbuildable by the player from time to time.

OTOH the ships you do get in the initial build seem to have too few guns but larger than the 9.4" which was otherwise standard before 1900. I don't see any 1890s vintage KM Bs which had less than three main guns--two fore and one aft.

Any comments from the devs?

Q turret doesn't need cross-deck firing, that's for wing guns.

1890 Bs can have a Q turret provided that the guns are no better than Q-2.

You can build a Brandenburg.

Just tested this proposition, and you are of course right.
I stand corrected, and will use this if possible!

I must say having now built quite a few 'six-guns' I can recommend them.

Also once you have turbines you can rebuild them, and if they're 20-21kt, they sometimes get reclassified as BBs. Not sure if this is intended. The only drawback being they're not real BBs, and if you forget this, and try going toe to toe with BBs built from the keel up, you'll most likely get massacred.

But you can certainly get a decent service life out of them, and in a line-of-battle engagement your firepower is obviously 50% higher per unit, assuming that you can manoeuvre to bring Q turret to bear.

Another sneaky one:

The forward 1+2 positions only block A turret, so can be combined with B turret. If the guns are again Q-2 or lower you can mount multiple guns in turrets 1+2 - the same applies to the 3+4+Y combination.

Yep been thinking about this today.

I have come to the view that it's bug. A B is a B, regardless of whatever upgrades you can jam into it. Now I have seen the designer reclassify an unbulged B as a BC after squeezing it up to 24 kts. This is starting to get silly.

For a start it's an extra 3 or 6 blockade points per ship. For another thing it confuses the AI which tries to use these things like a real BB, which would have been tactically unthinkable in the day anyway. The AI has built a few of these things itself (presumably in response to me), and does not appear to be using them well.

I believe the solution here is to simply not let the ship designer reclassify a B as anything else, ever. I can't see that this would have any undesirable side effects, whereas the current situation does.