British with the G3: "We've designed a battlecruiser that you would easily mistake for a super battleship" Americans: "We've designed a battleship that you could easily mistake for the Maginot line with a rudder"

"19-inches of belt armour..." >looking at my 19-inch secondary display >tilting head for better view "That is indeed a lot of armour."

Tillman 1 - ALL THE ARMOUR Tillman 2 - ALL THE GUNS Tillman 3 - SPEEEEED Tillman 4 - ALL THE ARMOUR AND ALL THE GUNS Tillman 4-1 - EVEN BIGGER GUNS Tillman 4-2 - EVEN MORE OF THE BIGGER GUNS

Crazy yes but you have to admit deep down inside I think everyone watching this channel would have loved to have seen a Tillman built

I worked for the "US water (aka Navy) Department" for 20+ years. I can tell you that the more ridiculous your future project request for funding is, the more likely it is to be approved!

Imagine the amount of quad bofors you could mount on these lol.

When I was about ten, I would draw ships like these, with 24 guns. And giant aircraft with 200 machine guns. I approve, and will fund it.

8x20 inch rifles. Why bother sinking the Japanese navy if you can sink Japan.

Tillman Battleships=when you have researched all the tech and built your docks to maximum size in Rule the Waves and the game hasn't ended yet so, you're bored and go into the ship design screen and say,"Well, what's the biggest and most insane thing I can design and build?"

"Why don't you build these?" "Because, senator, there is not enough steel in the world to support hubris of that magnitude."

This during war be like Enemy: *captain there's a island up ahead- WAIT ITS SHOOTING AT US*

"USS Compensation" and "Senator Tillman then did everyone a favor by dying"... this is pure comedy gold LOL

Each and every one of these designs would have been glorious in their impracticality. Imagine 24 16" Guns! You could have the forward and rear fire directors shooting at two totally separate targets with their respective turrets and still have a firepower advantage over almost any battleship.

Imagine the looks on the Navy’s faces if the Tillman’s had been approved in that meeting and suddenly they were expected to build several of the things...

I have to admit, part of me wishes they had built just one.

"Talk softly and carry a big stick". I think I found Teddy's ultimate stick!

who cares about the Panama canal, with a ship like this you could just blast a bigger one

Tillman IV: Tillman Harder

I'm actually rewatching this after a long time and..... I'm realizing just how much Drachinifel seemed to regret doing this video as his tone of voice during certain parts was like "dear god no, why do these ships exist"

Man I love these. 26 guns. 8x20 inch rifles. There is "over" in "lover", "lie" in "believe", "hell" in "hello". But there is no "sane" in "barrel count"!!!

It's like the designers eventually started making fun of Tillman. In a language he didn't understand (naval architecture).

Imagine if an eccentric trillionaire decided to build one of these. “Don’t let the flame die out!”

I would like to see the planning for loading those sextuplet turrets. The horror, the horror.

24x16"50cal Assuming it could fire the later 2700 pounder ap shells, than is a MIND BOGGLING broadside

So basically there's a good reason a Nimitz class carrier is named after Sen. Vinson and not Tillman.

Japan: We have Godzilla. America: We have a Tillman. Japan: Take our Geishas just don't hurt us.

I could never be In charge of budgets for the USN. Everytime they'd bring In these new designs and asked for money, I'd always say yes. Honestly, Imagine how badass these would've been In WW2 even.

18" belt armor - "Less battleship, more floating block of steel" - LOL

Sometime back, I built a 1/700 waterline master of a basic, Tillman hull and cast 6 copies in resin. One of these days, I'll get around to building them into the six known Tillman designs. This is a very informative guide with all the information I need, in one convenient place. Thanks!

You can tell Sen. Tillman had an eye for big ships and big guns.

6 16" guns. In one turret. The mind boggles...

Imagine the WW2 refits these battleships would've had.

Gotta give kudos for the use of a Rowan Atkinson moment at 7:15! Making military history fun! The best history teacher I ever had cracked jokes all through class and when the class took a test you'd hear scattered giggles as students remembered the jokes associated with the correct answers.

No one has ever accused Americans of thinking small.

Hmm, these Tillman ships look pretty small compared to the worlds largest commercial ships like the Mont (260.000 GT, 1500 ft long). I think he was not crazy, he just tried to get a look at a ship which would not get outdated within one decade by newer and larger ships. Once a ship is large enough, you can update it and keep it for a very long time just like the Iowa class and the Nimitz class.

Plan Z ...TEXAS STYLE!

I very much enjoyed this tutorial sir. I’m an American and frankly never heard of these plans drawn up for the Senator. Thank you for sharing.

Senator Tillman effectively being the Karen of naval construction.

Tillman 4-2 is basically the meta superheavy battleship in HOI4 after the Man the Guns DLC

10:35 I about lost it. It sounds like the original designers basically obliged Tillman simply as a way of metaphorically beating him over the head with the idea. You're a comedian, btw. Well done! Subscribed.

24 16" guns. If it fires its guns in succession, the first gun would reload when the last one would fire, thus creating a non-stop DAKKA.

The fact that wargaming hasn’t added this to world of warships yet is incredible. I think Tillman 4-2 should be either a tier 8 or 9 premium or event ship

every time i feel sad ( witch is once every two months ) i play this video , and all problems go away. Your maner of presentation is pure gold , jokes are superb :) This particilar video just makes my day brighter .

This was not ridiculous This was a chance at greatness

I get the feeling if the Yamato’s specs had been know the Montana class might have seen 4-2 become a reality. And I agree with the USS Compensation being the better name; her sister ship should have been USS Overkill. Beyond that ... well I think even getting two ships like that would be unlikely; three is just inconceivable. Hmm wait, there we go. With 4 if they actually lay down that hull as USS Please Stop Now

Tillman battleships, steam punk star destroyers on water!

9:40 “Senator Tillman then did everyone a favor by dying in 1918” After watching the Extra Credits video that featured Tillman, I’d say that’s a pretty accurate statement

It was my impression that the genesis of Tillman's requests were not only that the size and cost of U.S. battleships kept increasing but also that there constant cost overruns as well. As a result of this, Tillman asked them for the biggest they could come up with to try and get an upper limit of what appropriations would be needed.

I know they’re impractical, but my god do I wish these things were built. They’re just so beautiful, in more ways than one.

Just imagine how the Royal Navy would have reacted if the U.S. Navy had actually laid down one of those 18 inch gun monsters, a ship that outclassed everything in the Grand Fleet, and then some! A "Super-Duper-Duper Dreadnought." Not so funny then!

Note that the US Navy DID manufacture a single 18"/45 gun for test purposes just prior to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1923 being approved, which killed all of these very expensive battleship design competitions with the US, Japan, France, Italy, and UK designing ships with similarly large gunnery. The US got the COLORADO Class, the UK got the NELSON Class, the Japanese got the NAGATO Class, while the French, who did design a 17.7" (45cm) gun, and Italians did not enlarge their ships much at the time (Germany, of course, was out of this competition and Russia was not capable of such major undertakings due to the Bolshevik Revolution). The US gun was not tested at this time as an 18" gun, but had an extra length of barrel screwed onto its end and was relined as a 16" super-high-velocity (for the time) gun, which it was tested as. It was retired in the middle of the 1930s until the start of WWII, when it was taken out of mothballs, the extension sliced off and a new, modern-type 18" liner put back into what was now only a 42-caliber gun called the Mark "A". During WWII, it fired 3300-lb dummy shells simulating High Capacity shells (nose- and base-fuzed shore-bombardment ammo) and an experimental "B-2" design of a 3800-lb armor-piercing shell (AP, here with both a thin hollow pointed windscreen and a thick hardened AP cap) of an enlarged US 2700-lb 16" Mark 8 AP shell type. Samples of the shells and, I believe, the gun itself is still on display at the US Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, Dahlgren, Virginia, originally the last US Naval Proving Ground starting in 1917. Both ranging tests and, for the AP shell, armor-piercing tests were performed with the Mark "A" gun during WWII. Thus, the US was somewhat more serious about such maximum-sized warships than it might seem.

I would really like to see a Tillman IV (your choice) vs Yamato or maybe even present at the Battle of Samar "What If" video. Just for the sheer hell of it.

And here we have the perfect counter to the Russian Battleship line (when it arrives) in World of Warships.......Da comrade we had working Rail Guns in 1935 ;-)

The new extended US battleship tech tree in World of Warships... Starting at: tier 11 with the Tillman 3, very nearly an "I win button" it pretty much shrugs off most things that it will face tier 12 Tillman 4, this is the ship that says "I'm taking A cap" and means it as if he's going to get a drink from the fridge... tier 13 Tillman 4-1, against this ship you will be weighed, and you will be measured, and you will be found wanting... tier 14 the Tillman 4-2, the friendly team is reduced to only 5 ships but the Tillman 4-2 is equal to the 10 that were lost ^_^

You can imagine a young naval architect coming up with a plan for a ship strictly for the purpose of missing this guy off

imagine a midway-class carrier completely covered in bofors. the smoke would have been insane.

I've always wanted to see the two Gustav's mounted in the ultimate battleship,800 mm guns,fore and aft,reload machinery midships.

Tillman IV was the Death Star of it's day.

No joke when he showed the 2nd tillman Battleship i spit out my water

Wow!!! Surely they drew up those plans in order to mock and ridicule Senator Tillman. Absolutely loved the video!

When you max out the amount of main guns on your SH Battleships in HOI IV.

So the design process went like this? Navy designer 1: How many weapons do you want? Navy designer 2: Yes. Naval designer 1: Now your talking.

Tillman looks like a gilded-age version of Mad-Eye Moody.

The Yamurican? The Yankeemato? YANKEEMATOOOOOO!!!! XD

Imagine a 24 x16 inch broadside...

I guess we could’ve traded a few skyscrapers of the era for these behemoths. Assuming they weren’t lost in battle they could’ve been recycled into buildings.

Wargaming made it possible by having the Tillman 4-2 then refit it WW2 style by removing the middle turret and build a rear superstructure around it with some dual purpose 5 inchers and AA to boot thus presenting it to World of Warships as the tier 10 USN battleship USS Vermont.

It's got turret placement of the front end of a Renown with a Rodney front end shoved up it's backside. With more guns. It's got more guns on it's rear than most ships has on it's front. If you turn all it's turrets to the same side it might roll right over.

hey wargaming, how about a tier 11 battleship premium?

you mean *every battleship in from the depths*

Love the tone, love the information, love that these were never built

Playing From the Depth right now, and now I wanna build Tillman battleships!

Would love to see a vid on the Scrap Iron Flotilla (The V & W Class destroyers of the Royal Australian Navy during WW2)

Jesus, and i was shocked when I learned about the french quadruple turrets 😳

This guy was playing ultimate admiral dreadnoughts IRL, what a madlad

Great vid Drach! Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the Tillmans.

the Tillman 2 design echoes the old approach of Rolls Royce car makers to talking about the horsepower on their cars. they used to say simply that Horsepower on the model was: Adequate. so in that spirit the armament of the Tillman 2 Hyper Dreadnought was simply: Adequate.

Holy Mother of God, they would have been gigantic!

This is one of the funniest and most informative videos I have seen in forever.....Majors prop for making it.

Tillman: They won’t see this coming! Navy: WE’LL TAKE THE LOT

I've actually been building the Tillman IV in Ultimate Admiral: Dreadnoughts. I can usually sink a dozen regular size battleships with a single division, (that's 2 ships for those unfamiliar with naval fleet organization).

I always kind of wondered after learning about The Great Eastern which finished construction in 1858, why Britain didn't start building larger warships based around that design idea of a corrugated steel hull, if they could find a way around the paddle wheels it could prove quite a symbol of power and a useful troop carrier being able to travel from England to Australia without stopping to pickup coal, many of its records not being surpassed till the late 19th and early 20th centuries. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Great_Eastern "She was by far the largest ship ever built at the time of her 1858 launch, and had the capacity to carry 4,000 passengers from England to Australia without refuelling. Her length of 692 feet (211 m) was only surpassed in 1899 by the 705-foot (215 m) 17,274-gross-ton RMS Oceanic, her gross tonnage of 18,915 was only surpassed in 1901 by the 701-foot (214 m) 21,035-gross-ton RMS Celtic, and her 4,000-passenger capacity was surpassed in 1913 by the 4,935-passenger SS Imperator. "

One of your best ever, Monty Python class presentation. Thanks for the great series, I have a stack of battleship books in my toilet bookshelf.

I'm surprised that Tillman 2 didn't instead have six triple turrets. "Eh, who needs a superstructure anyways?"

Tillman's point wasn't "incremental increases" or "parity" of foreign navies, but clear superiority. In other words, instead of equaling possible opponents, build something significantly better than anything else in the world.

Fascinating! I never knew about any of this.

Awesome commentary, especially when you could not hide your giggle :)

A sight to behold had they built it...it would have been magnificent 🤩!!

the tillman battlewagons...oh boy.

It's hard to say which issues surrounding Tillman were more controversial, his crazy battleship designs, or his accidental death in Afghanistan, during a friendly fire incident. One things for sure, Tillman did live a LONG life, and looked surprisingly young just before his death in 2004, at 157. I'm guessing his irrational anger & violence, as well as his life's passion for disenfranchising and oppressing black people, may have served him as a kind of 'cardiovascular exercise'! Lol. Seriously though, Ben Tillman & Pat Tillman were 2 very different people! One a hero, one a complete dirtbag....

Damn, one of the most entertaining programs to date

“Floating mobile block of steel.” -Drachinifel I found this video hilarious.

This reminds me of the Bradley design scene from The Pentagon Wars.

The Panama Canal also determined the maximum size of the Titanic.

Your scripting and video snippets included, made this presentation spectacular and low key sarcastic. I enjoyed this presentation. Two thumbs up.

Need a WoWs event where it’s just Tillman Battleships. Brawling with each other.

Hell for any of these designs they would need the Panama Canal as a dry dock to fix the ships if they got ever got damaged.

Every time I watch this video, I feel strangely comforted. These ships might have been too ridiculous for the United States of America, but they will always and forever be the flagships of ‘MURICA.

My ideal Tillman would be thirty knots eighteen inch armor and sixteen eighteen inch guns in four quad turrets

I’ve heard about that the USN is thinking of building a battleship to stick in the South China Sea to survive a Chinese first strike. What are the odds something similar to one of these gets built?