Rule 5 Warships – KMS Ägir

Back from a semi-accidental couple weeks off, and picking up the Rule 5 posts more or less right where I left off. We first caught a glimpse of Ägir (or Aegir, depending on how you’re searching), in the Yat Sen post. Like most Iron Blood shipgirls, her rigging tends to have a feisty mind of its own sometimes.

Ägir’s design is based on the proposed O-class battlecruisers found in the 1939 Plan Z for the Kriegsmarine. The idea behind the O-class was fill the gap between the Kriegsmarine’s planned aircraft carriers and battleships, and the lighter escort cruisers. In theory, the O-Class could function semi-autonomously as commerce raiders or detach from a main fleet group to engage fleeing merchant ships or lighter surface combatants.

The O-class’s primary armament would have consisted of six 380mm guns in three dual turrets, backed up by six 150mm guns (presumably also in three pairs of dual turrets), plus a hefty AA compliment of eight 105mm dual purpose guns, eight 37mm guns, and twenty 20mm cannons. Six torpedo tubes were also slated to be carried, because nothing says “Hope your crew is good swimmers” like closing to torpedo range and firing off a full salvo after pounding a target with gunfire starting twenty-two miles out.

Side note that is definitely fodder for a non-Rule Five blog, but twenty-two mile main gun range? Something I’ve realized in researching some of these posts is just how far these main guns could reach by the end of their development life. I think that a lot of us have this image of ship-to-ship naval combat that’s heavily influenced by Hollywood depictions of Age of Sail gun battles and WW II movies, and don’t realize that the last few large ship gun battles started while just about over the horizon.

Anyway, back to Azur Lane and Ägir. Her name is taken from the Norse god of the sea, and as such, she shows up in-game with horns. She tends to be a supporting character for the Iron Blood faction, but also shows up in quite a lot of the official art.