A period of competition ensued as both navies created ever larger fleets and, during World War One, Germany began to build battlecruisers which were faster and stronger than anything British. The Royal Navy, who had been planning their next generation of ships for several years, responded with a similar initiative, upping the specifications of their previous battlecruisers to create the Admiral Class, the fastest and most deadly ships yet made, with 15 inch guns - an inch larger than the Germans - and a top speed of 32 knots. Coincidentally, a larger frame was required to mount the engines, leaving the Admirals as the longest ships in the world. The first of a proposed four was laid down at John Brown & Company Shipyards in Scotland on September 1st, 1916: she was called HMS Hood.
By this point other events had overtaken the Admiral class. The British lost eight ships and over six thousand lives during the Battle of Jutland on May 31st 1916, a bloody stalemate with Germany that proved militarily inconclusive, but ideologically powerful. The critical losses were three battlecruisers and their 3000 crew, exposing terrible weaknesses in both the existing craft and the forthcoming Admirals. Naval experts concluded that design changes were needed (although historians believe the main fault to have been the battlecruiser's increasing use as a battleship). In addition, British intelligence reported a German change of tact, also prompted partly by Jutland, where their superior firing and construction had been beaten by the sheer numbers of British craft. Unable to resolve this situation during wartime, the Kaiserreich switched its focus from capital ships and onto submarines, which they hoped would devastate the Royal Navy and allow their own craft a free, or at least equal, rein.
Consequently, the Hood was not just the first of her class, but also the last. Her three Admiral sisters were cancelled and she herself was subjected to a substantial redesign that sacrificed elements of firepower for more armour and the same high speeds making her, in theory at least, as fast as a cruiser and as protected as a battleship. Consequently, when Hood was launched on August 22nd 1918 she was unique. The British planned bigger ships, the so called 'Super Hoods' whose design was new and directly affected by Jutland, but the 1922 Treaty of Washington, in which Britain and the US agreed to limit the size of their navies and gain a form of parity, caused their cancellation.
