Russian Dreadnought Plans

By the Summer of 1914 the Tsar and the Russian Naval Ministry had come to a tentative agreement that the next stage forward in the development of the Imperial Russian Navy was to be the building of a number of 16"-gunned battleships . With developments in the Black Sea/Balkan region taking precedence in the minds of planners , one of the most severe threats to Russian ambition was deemed to be Turkey . Plans were thus drawn up , outlining the needs of the navy should a war with the Ottoman Empire occur by 1918 , a date seen as a very likely one . As well as the exploitation of the already-agreed lease on the French North African port of Bizerta , Russian planners hoped to lease the island of Lemnos from the Greeks , and to build up the Black Sea fleet to a position where it was greatly superior over the expanding Turkish navy . Historians are in disagreement over the likely timescale for this expansion , and over how politically able the Tsar was to have pushed these plans through the Duma ; the earliest date suggested for the ordering of such behemoths , at their time the largest battleships in the world , is 1915 , the latest is after 1920 .

As it was the First World War erupted in the Summer of 1914 and no further advances were made with the more ambitious plans as they were overtaken by events . Nevertheless , the best approximation of the appearance of these ships comes from the Nikolayevsk yard on the Black Sea who in 1916 drew up a design study , apparently aimed at showing the government what it could do for them after the war , and keeping their technical skills finely honed . Thus does the only detailed plan of the proposed 16"-gunned battleship come from a semi-unofficial source .

Here we have the side and top-down views of the proposed vessel . . .