Should the nation decline and continue to expand their navy until near parity, the treaty nations can try to force them to disarm up to 80% of the number of capital ships. If a country outside the treaty reaches a certain percentage of the British size in capital ships, they can be invited into the treaty. These restrictions forced the designers of warships in the interwar period to come up with some interesting compromises, and although we can’t possibly model all the interconnected ways in which these restrictions impact design - the Nelson class baffled American designers who were trying to comprehend why the British would build a ship like that - we did want to model some of the impact and also represent the diplomatic effects of the naval treaties. In early 1936, the London Naval Treaty was up for renegotiation and that, as they say, was when the trouble started. In 1930, the signatories of the Washington Naval Treaty came together and negotiated the London Naval Treaty, which limited the construction of cruisers and stipulated strict restrictions on their size. The result was the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, which forbade any new battleship construction for a period of 10 years and restricted the maximum size of ships as well as their gun armament.
At the same time, Britain and France were at the edge of bankruptcy from the debts they had accumulated during the Great War and could not afford another naval arms race with the fairly untouched nations of Japan and the US. During and after the Great War, naval planners the world over were drawing up plans for new battleships that made use of new technologies, with ever bigger guns requiring ever stronger armor meaning increasingly large ships that were becoming even more expensive. Hello, and welcome back to another exciting dev diary about ship design!Īs many of you noted last week, ship design in the interwar years was heavily restricted by the Washington Naval Treaty and the First London Naval Treaty.