Kyra Class Battleship

The Kyra class is the newest of modern Alician battleship classes, made to replace the older Morin class battleships. The new class is set to be the new pride of the Alician Royal Navy along side the other ships being introduced during Princess Alice's naval reformatting and upgrading cycle. Currently the class run cycle only consists of two ships, however should the proposed 4th and 5th fleet proposals be accepted then it is predicted that the line will increase to four.

Proposal and Design
The original plan for the Kyra class was to have the ships be built from scratch, however after an evaluation by Eloise Aubree it was decided that it would be more efficient to break down the two Morin class ships, the evaluation stating that the situation did not call for the Royal Navy to have a large number of capital ships and that reusing the older ships would be much better than having them sit around doing nothing. As the current threat to Alician sea control was minimal the production went into work right away, the new Princess Alice not wishing to have the sea control at risk for any longer than needed. Once both the Morin and the Kalarie returned to Scerenesea Naval Arsenal they were quickly stripped of their primary armaments and taken apart piece by piece while in the adjacent docks the two ships were laid down, so began the construction of the Kyra and Soraya.

Construction ran in to a couple of issues, one came from Princess Alice insisting that the armament of the ships had to be above a certain threshold citing that these ships not only had to be the pride of the battlefield but the pride of the world and the second came from the inferior equipment lifted from the Morin class before it. Alice had oversaw the construction of these ships with close interest and the request to up arm the ships was a large setback in the construction. Originally the ships were going to use the same guns from the Morin class however with the advent of newer large calibre weapons the Princess insisted that these new weapons should be fitted to these brand new ships while they were still being made and soon enough the weapons were made part of the new design. The second problem was that the older equipment was not up to par with the newer design of ship, the fuel burners present on board the Morin class were much to heavy as well as fairly inefficient compared to recent models, the older ones would not power the Kyra class to the desired level as such new boilers were needed to power the brand new steam engines made specifically for these ships. On top of this the clockwork mechanations in the Morin class were based around a much older system, requiring a higher number of small parts and more prone to machine failure, for the Kyra class these high maintenance systems were replaced for a much more robust series of clockwork, making use of regimented systems so that any problems that arise can be quickly isolated and replaced rather than requiring hours of precise work.

The system of signal flags, runners and predetermined battle planning was something that needed to be addressed with the new ships as well, the reliance on such an out of date and slow system putting the entire ship and its crew at major risk. The new design made use of clockwork technology, a large series of panels with relevant responses in key areas on the ship, when an order is sent through the system the response will become visible on the main panel with the receiver required to send a confirmation message right back. The system was only so precise however, so older methods were placed in as secondaries. However one extra layer was added to this system, an area within the ship was assigned as a communications administration room. Within the room all messages could be observed by the operator, allowing them to keep an eye on the system to make sure it was all flowing properly and able to respond to any situations where the system breaks. Should a message be sent to an area of the ship and it not arrive at the desired area the operator can resend the message through their channel to make sure they get it, likewise should a confirm not come through the operator can send it for them.

Eventually the ship design picked up speed once again, the remaining problems being ironed out as best they could, though the process lasted much longer than the princess had desired and eventually ended up taking nearly two years, which for an entirely new battleship was good time.

Armament and Armour
The armament on the Kyra class was originally planned to be pretty much arm for arm the same as at the time there had still been nothing encountered that could match the firepower of Alician ships, but with Princess Alice's demands things were changed. The Morin mounted two turrets with two 34cm ANC mk3 battleship cannons, having enough firepower to deal with pretty much anything that Alicia has encountered to the date, even its own ships, however the newer model was to be placed on the Kyra class. The mk4 offered a much more efficient reloading system, the breech loading mechanism was made to be much simpler and more robust to prevent mechanical failure. Secondly was tight twist rifling of the barrel, something that had been used in smaller arms for a while in the Alician Military to increase accuracy, range and ballistic stability, in testing this provided a much tighter spread of shell hits on target. While these two were the main reason to have upgrade the guns he final one was for the new types of shell that had been recently developed for Naval batteries across the board. The shells, designed for use in rifled barrels carried special charges aside from the usual payloads and while they could still be used in the traditional smoothbore barrels, the accuracy that rifling offered made them a much more desirable prospect. These shells made the departure from the highly standardised shell that was used by the Royal Navy for years, offering several new payloads for use in combat. The standard shell remained but along side it now came these new rounds, ES Explosive Shatter and EL Explosive Luminescence, the first being a fragmentation round that sprayed varying kinds of shrapnel expelled by a large explosive charge and the second being more of a utility round to blind or light up a large area. These new cannons would be housed in an entirely new turret with their own rangefinding equipment and self enclosed ventilation. Along side the main armament came the standard sub cannons, the 13cm ANC mk2 dual that had been on the Morin class before, lifted directly from them and placed on the new ships, though for the Kyra class the number of sub guns was increased to sixteen from eight. The newest addition to battleship armament design was to add several small calibre rifles across the deck of the ship, these small weapons were placed to deal with the threat of flying creatures and targets that would be deemed wasteful to fire main or sub batteries on.

Armour became a real issue during the design phase for the Kyra class, the ship had to retain a level of armour that would make it difficult to sink by its own means, meaning it needed to be able to take shots from its own battery. Though with the redesign of the weapons on the ship this made the research null invoid, the executive decision was made to overlook an entire armour redesign though as the ship had already been laid down and partially made. As such the armour offered little over the Morin class which was more than enough to handle any current threats that Alicia could encounter, though substantial redesigns were made to the deck and turrets. The deck was armoured up slightly to 'future proof' it in case a threat would arise, the Morin having a very thin deck that was prone to damage from storms let alone potential combat. The turrets were redesigned vastly to accommodate the new cannons and equipment, the overall thickness was reduced to cut down on weight and improve traverse as well as make more room on the inside, the front facing given an angled slant to increase the effective armour.