Brazil builds dreadnoughts

[minhow]

Nowadays the brazilian government is trying to build their own nuclear submarine, that is a prestigious vessel for a country to own. To do this they did partnerships with foreign countries, mainly France, and with tech transfers and licensing, they built conventional subs are on they way to make the SSN. They are building under license german frigates too.

But traveling back in time more than a century, the brazilians did a naval rearmament, and purchased from UK, two battleships from the Minas Geraes class, they were built in britain, nothing extraordinary, just a military sale. It started an arms race in south america, and even alarmed the US, due an american country having a powerful capital ship.

But what if there was a faction that instead of buying a finished BB, they decided to build it on Brazil instead? Like that is happening with current naval shipbuilding. They would develop the shipyards, industries, using licenses and tech transfers, initially the goal is to build smaller ships, to gain expertise, like torpedo boats and destroyers, then cruisers and in the end a capital ship.

The closest of it was Japan and their naval development, that licensed and received technology from britain, with the Kongo class being the last "foreign" design on Japan, a design that inspired the HMS Tiger. Imagine a brazilian Kongo/Tiger.

How things would change with a SA country building battleships?

 

[Lascaris]

Today Brazil is an industrial power. Back in 1910 what was the Brazilian per capita industrial output?

 

[RamscoopRaider]

Brazil could do it, but it would probably take 20 years to take effect. It took a long time for Japan to go from building Gunboats, effectively what Brazil could make on its own in 1905, to building battleships of its own, and Brazil would need the same amount of time

The best opportunity would be committing to it when they built the Almirante Tamadere in the 1880's, at that point they built a crappy protected cruiser, they could follow it up with a slightly less crappy one in the early 1890's and some gunboats, get a mediocre one and some more gunboats in the late 1890's, an average pair of protected cruisers and some unprotected ones in the early 1900's, some good protected cruisers in the late 1900's, and lay down battleships with foreign parts around 1910, with domestic parts gradually replacing foreign ones over the course of subsequent ships until full domestic is achieved around 1925

In any case it would require consistent spending on new warships to keep the industries working, and would cost way more than just buying British in exchange for inferior ships delivered late

 

[jlckansas]

If Brazil played the US, UK, France, Germany and Italians off of one another they might get help on a build or two. Get one or two think the other is getting a better deal you could get something going.

 

[M79]

*The Empire needs to last a while longer with the Emperor/Empress deciding this is a priority
*Focus nation-building and industrialization around this as a rallying point - "Great nations must be able to build their own Great Navies"! or somesuch
*Will still take 20+ years to achieve, maybe Brazil drops a Tillman or two in 1915
*Assembling parts of the vessels inland and completing final assembly at Port may prove useful for other countries ahead of schedule
*How far does Brazil ultimately go? Especially if the Empire remains in control?

 

[YYJ]

What do Chile and Argentina do in response? Does this bootstrap a South American ship building industry? A shipbuilding industry that would be building merchant ships most of the time in order to keep up income and capacity to be ready when the next military contract comes? How does this ATL shipbuilding industry deal with a the global economic booms and busts from the 1890s forward?

 

[Dorknought]

The Almirante Tamadere was the poster boy for why Brazil is not ready to do this.

The closest example is not Japan or Italy but Spain and Turkey. You would need to have a warship builder own and supervise the yard and they wont do that without a steady steam of work. Most of the armour, armament and machinery will come from the parent company. Brazil wasn't at this stage till the late 30's and only upto Destroyers.

The other example is The Netherlands where the private yards were not prepared to take on the risks of building battleships so the Dutch government were looking for foreign builds in 1914.

Another aspect is finance, typically a government can raise £2m to build a ship but in a yard that the bank also finances. No bank will extend credit for the £20m needed to create a battleship building industrial complex in Brasil, not when they bankroll yards across Europe.

A contemporary article on why not to build battleships locally.

 

[Wolf1965]

One of the questions is how many parts can Brazil import and still call it a home-built warship. From memory: both the foundries for armor and the workshops that make gun barrels and reduction gears are very capital- and labor-intensive institutions. Building these without a need to make a larger number of large armored warships is not worth the investment.
So, if they import the guns, armor and gear: Is this still a Brazilian warship?

 

[Coulsdon Eagle]

One of the questions is how many parts can Brazil import and still call it a home-built warship. From memory: both the foundries for armor and the workshops that make gun barrels and reduction gears are very capital- and labor-intensive institutions. Building these without a need to make a larger number of large armored warships is not worth the investment.
So, if they import the guns, armor and gear: Is this still a Brazilian warship?

Gun construction is the real big step to take. Recall the Greek dreadnought being built in Germany had its guns ordered from the US. And relatively late the Japanese were still buying their guns from British firms. Krupps, Vickers-Armstrong & the big American firms can undercut any local firms; it would have to be a political decision to spend more money on plant for gun building - and what sort of demand would there be once the few Brazilian battleships, so the financial legacy may be pretty poor.

 

[TenThousandToddlers]

Give them 10-15 years from design to full readiness and I bet they can do it. That gives time for design foibles, money issues, shipyard expansions, worker/knowledge imports, constructions, etc. To manage it they may need to import essentially entire factories (IE, have an American or British factory straight up build the facilities to manufacture gun barrels).
If they're willing to throw enough money, they'll get there.

 

[naraic]

Gun construction is the real big step to take. Recall the Greek dreadnought being built in Germany had its guns ordered from the US. And relatively late the Japanese were still buying their guns from British firms. Krupps, Vickers-Armstrong & the big American firms can undercut any local firms; it would have to be a political decision to spend more money on plant for gun building - and what sort of demand would there be once the few Brazilian battleships, so the financial legacy may be pretty poor.

The Espana's guns all came from Britain too.

 

[Guilherme Loureiro]

The Almirante Tamadere was the poster boy for why Brazil is not ready to do this.

Not just that one(although it is a great example). In the late 1880s, the Brazilian Navy started to design a class of four monitors for use in the Paraguay River. Due to a debate about the the number of shafts and rudders needed to give the ships the needed maneuverability, keel-laying for the first two units was delayed about two years, to June and July 1890, respectively(with the other two units never being laid down). The first unit(Pernambuco) was completed and commissioned in 1910. The second one(Paraguassu), would only be delivered to the Brazilian Navy(to a much modified design) in 1940. At that time, Brazil was trying to build destroyers for the Navy, both of US(the M-class, based on one of the units of the Mahan class - USS Cassin, IIRC) and British(the A-class, based on the H-class destroyers of the RN, altered to use US powerplants and armament). The three M-class units got priority and were commissioned before the end of the War, but the six units of the !-class would be completed either in 1949(the two units laid down in July 1940), or in 1951(the remaining units, laid down in December 1940).

Brazil didn't have the industrial base, the skilled personnel nor the economy needed to build destroyers and cruisers*, let alone dreadnoughts. Even when we were building modern ships(during the Triple Alliance War and before), we were just assembling them - supposedly, all of the nails used in the monitor Pará's hull were imported, because the Brazilian industries(the ones that existed, anyway) couldn't supply nails to specification. And the ships of the 1890s were far more technologically sophisticated than that.

* And refused to invest in even a kernel for it; one of the debates that preceded the 1910 Fleet was whether to build the infrastructure and the skilled personnel first or not; the winning idea was the obsolescence of the Navy was so much, it was better to first acquire the ships, then build the infrastructure needed... which of course was never done.

The best opportunity would be committing to it when they built the Almirante Tamadere in the 1880's, at that point they built a crappy protected cruiser, they could follow it up with a slightly less crappy one in the early 1890's and some gunboats, get a mediocre one and some more gunboats in the late 1890's, an average pair of protected cruisers and some unprotected ones in the early 1900's, some good protected cruisers in the late 1900's, and lay down battleships with foreign parts around 1910, with domestic parts gradually replacing foreign ones over the course of subsequent ships until full domestic is achieved around 1925

In any case it would require consistent spending on new warships to keep the industries working, and would cost way more than just buying British in exchange for inferior ships delivered late

That was the original plan(I think). The chaos of the late 1880s and the 1890s, and the fiscal austerity of the early 1900s, made that an impossibility. By then, the naval industry(that is, the Naval Dockyard at Rio de Janeiro) was so obsolete that it would have to be begun from zero. After the Revolt of the Lash, spending money on the Navy became anathema. In the 1920s, some naval officers supported the Tenentes in the Copacabana Fort and São Paulo insurrections, and the civil government refused to spend money on the Navy again. Only in the 1930s, there would be interest in restarting naval industry in Brazil(and it would die again in the 1940s as the Brazilian government again gave priority to receiving completed ships from abroad...).

 

[SealTheRealDeal]

Weren't the Spanish battleships built by a company set up and jointly owned by UK firms? I imagine Brazil could get domestic battleships in a similar fashion, incentivizing a foreign firm to set up a yard and factories in Rio or wherever.