Hello everybody. I signed up here quite a while back, but I never got around to posting anything. Today that changes.


For the last 8 months or so I’ve been working on a project to build every ship that fought at the Battle of Jutland on the 31^st of May and 1^st of June 1916. I’ve finally finished, and since today is the 99^th anniversary of the battle it seems to be the perfect time to release. So here it is.


 


Any of you who also spend time on minecraftforum might have seen my work in progress thread over there. There are more screenshots and such in that thread, if you're interested. <LINK>


 
The Historical Bit


The Battle of Jutland was the only full scale clash of battleships of the First World War, and the largest engagement of steel battleships ever seen. The British Royal Navy and the German Kaiserliche Marine had been playing cat-and-mouse around the North Sea for the first two years of the war. The Royal Navy had such an advantage in numbers that the Germans couldn’t risk a full fleet battle that they expected to lose, so they attempted to ambush and destroy smaller groups of British ships. The British tried to intercept the German ambushes with their entire fleet, which was made easier since they had copies of the German code books.


In May 1916, the German plan was that their Scouting force of battlecruisers under Franz Hipper would shell English coastal towns, in the hope of drawing out the British battlecruisers under David Beatty. Hipper would then lead Beatty to the full High Seas Fleet under Reinhard Scheer, where Scheer and Hipper would destroy the British ships before the main British fleet could react.


But what the Germans didn’t know was that the Royal Navy were ready for them. The British Grand Fleet under John Jellicoe was in position just off the Jutland peninsula. Beatty’s task was to find the High Seas Fleet and lead it to Jellicoe where he could destroy it with his overwhelming numbers. Overall, the British fleets boasted 28 dreadnought battleships, 9 battlecruisers, 8 armoured cruisers, 26 light cruisers, 79 destroyers and a seaplane carrier. The Germans could field 16 dreadnought battleships, 6 pre-dreadnought battleships,  5 battlecruisers, 11 light cruisers and 61 torpedo boats.


It would take far too long to go into detail here about exactly how the battle unfolded, so I’ll keep it brief and recommend the extensive Wikipedia article on the subject if you want to read about it. In short, the British plan for Beatty to lead the Germans into a trap worked, though three of the British balttecruisers were blown up in the process, suffering from ammunition explosions because they’d got into the habit of ignoring proper powder handling procedure to increase their rate of fire. Admiral Jellicoe deployed his fleet perfectly to cross Scheer’s T, and took the Germans completely by surprise. Scheer pulled off a perfect emergency about turn to move his fleet out of harm’s way, covering his retreat with a torpedo boat attack which Jellicoe evaded. He later turned back towards the British line, to cause confusion and to try to buy some more time until night fell. Again, he turned away, this time covering his retreat with a daring charge by the German battlecruisers.


After night fell, there was furious fighting in the darkness between the German fleet and British light forces which were trying to torpedo the German capital ships. Jellicoe tried to keep his fleet in between the Germans and their home ports so that he could resume the battleship action in the morning, but the Germans managed to slip away.


Both fleets emerged from the battle largely intact, though the Germans sank more ships than the British did. Many people at the time saw it as a German victory, however more recently it had been seen as indecisive, and an overall British strategic victory. The Royal Navy was left in control of the sea, and the Kaiserliche Marine largely abandoned any attempts to challenge the Grand Fleet directly for the rest of the war.


The Builds

As I said, I've built every ship that was present (or rather, built every ship class and copied and pasted sister ships!). I've also made any variations within a class that I was aware of. All ships are built in plain iron aside from the German torpedo boats in grey wool. I may do an update in future where I recolour them all appropriately for Jutland using the Xtrablocks mod to give me all the particular colours I want to use. But I wanted the download here to be one that would work in vanilla. It was built in 1.7.10 if that's important to anybody.

I've built a memorial building as the map centrepiece, a platform rising from the seafloor on a forest of stone columns. The memorial building itself is a baroque dome, surrounded by a memorial garden which contains 8645 poppies, one for every man killed in the battle. Each of the four fleets is docked along a jetty stretching off to each of the four compass points (as can be seen in the fleet renders), the Grand Fleet to the North, the Battlecruiser Fleet to the West, the Scouting Force to the South and the High Seas Fleet to the East.

Each and every build was completed by me in single player creative with rather heavy use of World Edit.

Unfortunately none of the ships have any sort of interior. I had enough building to be doing as it was with the exteriors!

The top-down view of the map uploaded here is a shrunk/compressed version. See here for the full size: <LINK>


Licence


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.




Regarding the above license, given the amount of time I’ve put into this project I’m feeling quite protective of it. If you want to do something with the project which is not allowed under the license, please do ask me.

Also, since this is so big it's quite likely that there's some mistakes somewhere. If you spot one, please let me know!