Yellowknife Azur lane

Maple Monarchy

During the second world war, Canada's navy was mostly made up of smaller vessels, corvettes, destroyers, and cruisers. In this part of the story which is strictly for background information and world building, I will talk about my fictional Canadian battleships, there story, and how they fit into my alternate version of Azur lane.

(If you came for the story and only care for the part about Azur lane, you may find this boring. But for the sake of your understanding about the story, I suggest you read it anyway.)

(Also the writing below is alternate history.)

We will start with Yellowknife, he is easily flustered, a little shy during first meetings, an excellent fighter, though a little cocky, and a generally a light hearted caring guy who enjoys seeing others happy. I have been working on a drawing to give his description, but it isn't ready so I will just describe him. He is tall, about six foot six inches tall, an average build, and semi long cinnamon hair. He wears either a thick brown coat with dark grey pants, or a white long sleeve shirt a deep blue pants. His sword always on his belt, rigging active or not. I will not describe the other Canadas because they won't be appearing during the story.

To start, we will have to go back, way back. The year is 1906, the English have recently commissioned HMS Dreadnought and started a naval arms race. Among the many nations racing to build and commission Dreadnoughts of their own, Canada's newly formed navy established in 1900 wanted in on the action. After consulting with Great Britain, Canada's naval board brought together a team of designers and officially started the Heavy Warship Development Program. The program was tasked with developing light and heavy cruisers, and more importantly capital ships. In 1907 development of a class of Dreadnoughts began, and in 1909 just two years later, the resulting designs where submitted to the Royal Canadian Navy board and were soon accepted and three ships were ordered. This class of ship would be called the Aggressor class. The Aggressors were quite unique and horribly flawed ships. They were only around five hundred feet long, incredibly slow with a eighteen knot top speed, a decent ten inch thick armour belt stretched along most of the hull, laughable deck armour only three inches thick, and they were armed with three slowly rotating quadruple eleven inch gun turrets clad in ten inch thick armour plate. But the ship's biggest flaw by far is their criminally bad watertight bulkheads and citadel protection, if the ships sustained flooding, it was very hard to stop the spread of water to other compartments. Worse still, if the ship's citadel took fire near the magazines, the poor armour on the citadel would likely fail and the magazines could be detonated. The three ships were named HMCS Aggressor (hull number one), HMCS Triumph (hull number two), and HMCS Resolve (hull number three). (HMCS stands for His/Her Majesty's Canadian Ship if you were wondering)

The Aggressors remained in Canada during the first year of World War One, and were moved to Great Britain in 1915. During that year and for the beginning of 1916, they remained in port with the British grand fleet. At the very end of May however, they moved out with the rest of the grand fleet to engage Imperial Germany's high seas fleet at the battle of Jutland. During the battle, HMCS Triumph received several hits, one starting a fire in the lower decks. The ship's crew attempted to put the fires out but soon the fires spread to the forward magazines, which like many English ships, had their doors and hatches removed for efficiency. As a result, Triumph exploded, taking nearly her entire crew with her. HMCS Aggressor took a torpedo hit on the aft port side, this crippled her propulsion and steering. She would later be taken under tow to England for repairs. HMCS Resolve took many hits and was the only Aggressor to preform well at all, dealing a nearly fatal blow to a German armoured cruiser. She eventually had her forward turret disabled and was set on fire, later in the battle she was hit by a torpedo amidships which caused severe flooding which put the ship in danger of capsizing. More hits caused her targeting and rangefinding equipment to be destroyed rendering her gunfire almost entirely ineffective. In the closing hours of the battle, one of her engines suffered mechanical failure which dropped her speed dramatically, and a failure with the poorly designed loading systems caused an explosion in the middle turret destroying it. While on her way back to port, her engines destroyed themselves and she was taken under tow back to port.