Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/Peer review/Braunschweig class battleship

Braunschweig class battleship

I recently rewrote this article, and it just passed GA. I'd like to get some suggestions for further improvement. Thanks. Parsecboy (talk) 17:46, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Cam

Overall, another excellent article. That said, a few minor suggestions:

• Could the second paragraph of the initial "design" section be split off into a separate "Propulsion" section below the other two?
• Obviously, the ships did not have identical service histories. could that section be reworked to have a little independent bit about each of the individual ship histories?
• Are there images of any of the other ships (ie not Hessen?) that could be used as well on this article?
• In the infobox, could the range, be cited (just because it isn't mentioned anywhere else)?

That's all I've got for now. All the best in taking the article forward! Cam ^(Chat) 18:40, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments, Cam. I split the propulsion section as you suggested. As to the service histories, as far as I can tell, the ships all served together during the early period of WWI in the IV battle squadron, but didn't see much action. Although, it seems that Braunschweig and Elsaß both took part in the Battle of the Gulf of Riga in 1915, so I'll add that posthaste (it's funny, because I more or less wrote that article's summary of the battle, but when I came to this one, forgot that those two ships were there). But, other than Riga and Hessen's participation at Jutland, it doesn't seem like the ships had eventful careers. There's nothing on their pre-war service in any of the books I've got, or anything I can find through Google books. I combined it because it didn't seem useful to essentially repeat the same information for each ship in a setup like this. There aren't many good images of the ships on Commons, but there was a decent photo of Preußen in 1932 that I added to the article. There's a picture of Lothringen on Commons, but it's pretty crappy, IMHO. I thought I had mentioned the range in the text, but apparently not. I'll add that and cite it. Parsecboy (talk) 21:26, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

Nick-D

This is a very solid article about an interesting class of ships - great work. My comments are:

• At the risk of opening a can of worms, I think that you should note that the Kaiserliche Marine was the Imperial German Navy in the lead sentence - I've read widely on WWI, and have never seen the term 'Kaiserliche Marine' used, and I doubt that it will be familiar to many readers - the lead sentence could read: 'The Braunschweig class battleships were pre-dreadnought battleships of the Kaiserliche Marine (the German Imperial Navy).'
• I think that the 'construction' section should be placed after the 'design' section given that the design preceded construction
• It would be helpful if the ships' intended role and any lessons which were incorporated from previous designs was discussed in the 'design' section - was the class built as coast defence ships, for instance?
• Is there anything which can be said about the ships' pre-WWI service? Braunschweig had been in commission for almost a decade at the time war started.
• Why were the ships withdrawn from service in 1916? Similarly, why were they reactivated after the war - was this purely because Germany had no better ships left and were unable to build new battleships? Nick-D (talk) 10:03, 19 February 2009 (UTC)

I've fixed the first two things you pointed out. I can't find anything in the books that I've got that say a whole lot about the design process, other than technical details. If I could get my hands on a copy of Conway's 1860-1905, I could probably find a lot of that information, but it's out of print and very hard to find. The ships were built as sea-going battleships—the naval rivalry between Germany and Great Britain was in full swing by now. There's very little on their service histories in general, but what little I could find was all WWI and after, with the exception of Hessen having accidentally rammed and sunk a Danish steamer. From what I've been able to find, the ships were withdrawn from service due to manpower shortages. That is exactly the reason the ships were reactivated; all of Germany's dreadnoughts were either on the bottom of Scapa Flow or ceded to the Allies as war prizes. Parsecboy (talk) 13:21, 19 February 2009 (UTC)