USS Tillman

The "Maximum Battleships", also known as the "Tillman Battleships", were a series of World War I-era design studies for extremely large battleships, prepared in late 1916 and early 1917 upon the order of Senator "Pitchfork" Benjamin Tillman by the Bureau of Construction and Repair (C&R) of the United States Navy. They helped influence design work on the Pennsylvania and first South Dakota classes of battleships. The plans prepared for the senator were preserved by C&R in the first of its "Spring Styles" books, where it kept various warship designs conceptualized between 1911 and 1925. “Maximum battleships” referred to the largest-possible battleships the U.S. Navy could afford to construct and field while still being able to utilize the Panama Canal.