While Minister Warton, Vice Admiral Hastings, and Rear Admiral Hood were finalizing the deployment of the Brit Nation's Channel Fleet, out on the North Sea, Rear Admiral Hipper's high-speed raiding fleet had already been sailing due west at full speed through thick fog for an entire morning.
This was Lieutenant Lelouch's first time aboard a real warship, so he kept a low and humble profile the entire morning. He simply walked around to observe and learn, strictly avoiding any restricted areas and refusing to speak out of turn.
At noon, the fleet reached the waters roughly 120 nautical miles west of the Demanian-Netherlands border, entering the edge of the North Sea's famous Dogger Bank shallows. Only then did Rear Admiral Hipper decisively order a change in course.
"Hard to port. Heading 210, straight toward Ostend on the coast of Belgin."
The fleet—comprising four battlecruisers, two armored cruisers, four light cruisers, and eight destroyers—soon began its gradual turn south.
Their original due-west heading slowly shifted to thirty degrees west of due south (270 degrees being due west, and 180 degrees due south).
Standing beside Rear Admiral Hipper with a pair of binoculars in hand, Lelouch gazed at the majestic warships making their turn, his heart surging with excitement.
Before this sortie, Lelouch had mistakenly believed that Rear Admiral Hipper could only deploy three battlecruisers. To his surprise, there were actually four, along with two armored cruisers. For a moment, he thought he'd gotten his facts wrong, only to later realize this was due to subtle differences between this world and real history—
After all, the world Lelouch now inhabited was slightly harmonized. In this world, the Western nations and the Far East were completely isolated, never interacting, and no Western powers went out of their way to colonize the East.
As a result, this world's Demania had no Asia-Pacific colonies. Their naval development didn't need to prioritize open-ocean warfare, as their furthest colony was Tanzania in East Africa.The resulting butterfly effect was that this timeline's Demanian Navy placed relatively less emphasis on cruising range and deep-sea raiding when designing its warships. Its vessels were built specifically for decisive fleet battles.
This allowed their naval construction to avoid a few missteps and better concentrate its resources. Indirectly, it gave Hipper slightly more available warships right now than what Lelouch remembered from Earth's history in his past life.
The main impacts were seen in the realms of battleships and battlecruisers:
First, in the realm of battlecruisers: in this world, right before the dawn of the dreadnought era, the Demanians built their final class of armored cruisers, the Scharnhorst-class (referring to the 1904 class that included the Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, entirely unrelated to the World War II ships laid down in 1936). Compared to its Earth counterpart, it had a poorer cruising range but significantly better armor and speed, while maintaining equivalent firepower.
Later, upon hearing that Britannia had invented the concept of the "battlecruiser," the Demanians immediately followed suit, avoiding any strategic deception. In original history, the Demanians would have built an abysmal "large cruiser," the Blucher, as a prototype for battlecruisers. Now, that failure was completely bypassed.
The name "Blucher" still existed, but it became a sister ship of the Von der Tann-class battlecruisers. Because the Blucher was built first, this inaugural class of battlecruisers was simply renamed the Blücher-class. Subsequent battlecruisers also avoided a few minor pitfalls thanks to the extra experience accumulated early on.
Second, in the realm of battleships: because the Demanians didn't need to consider long-distance expeditions, upon entering the dreadnought era, they only stumbled slightly with their first class, the Nassau-class battleship, which couldn't fire all its main guns in a single broadside. Starting from the subsequent Helgoland-class, they preemptively fixed this issue, ensuring all main guns could fire to one side.
All subsequent battleships boasted better broadside capabilities, with slightly improved firepower or armor compared to their historical counterparts, albeit at the cost of cruising range. The exact details were too numerous to list at the moment.
Of course, the isolation from the Far East didn't just benefit the Demanian Navy; the opposing Britannians also reaped minor advantages—
For example, because this world's Fusang was completely closed off, it was entirely different from Earth's Japan. Therefore, this world's Fusang never purchased the Kongō from Britannia. As a result, the British Army ended up with an additional Iron Duke-class battleship, built using the exact resources that went into the Kongō in Earth's history.
However, Britannia's colonies still spanned the globe. Even without the Far East, they still had Australia and New Zealand, so their warship designs remained unchanged from Earth.
All these subtle changes meant that today, Rear Admiral Hipper's fleet was anchored by a core of four battlecruisers, namely:
The flagship Derfflinger and its sister ship, the Seydlitz (in original history, the Seydlitz was in a class of its own), alongside the Blücher-class Blucher and Von der Tann (as shown below).
The lead ship of the Moltke-class battlecruisers, the Moltke—which historically should have been under Hipper's command—had been blockaded in the Black Sea alongside its sister ship, the Goeben, for various reasons before the war. They had been lent to the Osmans. If there was ever a chance to visit the Eastern Front, they could certainly be put to good use.
As for the two armored cruisers, the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau (as shown below), historically they were assigned to the Asiatic Squadron before the war. On their voyage home after war broke out, they were intercepted and destroyed by the Britannians in the waters off the Falkland Islands near Argentina, resulting in the death of their commander, Vice Admiral Spee.
But since Demania lacked Asian colonies in this life, there was no Asiatic Squadron. The two ships had safely stayed home and remained in perfect condition, and Vice Admiral Spee was still very much alive.
Further down were the four light cruisers, consisting of two Magdeburg-class (1912) and two Kolberg-class (1910) vessels.
As for the eight destroyers, they were utter garbage, barely worth mentioning. The German Army's World War I destroyers only had 88mm main guns, which couldn't compare at all to the British Army's 120mm guns. Only their torpedo performance was somewhat comparable.
...
Lelouch had spent the entire morning figuring out the fleet's composition and the history behind it all.
Now, seeing Rear Admiral Hipper order an early turn south, Lelouch did some quick mental calculations before voicing a minor question:
"Your Excellency, rushing to turn south now might save us a bit of distance and time, but won't it increase the risk of premature exposure? We're only about thirty nautical miles from the Netherlands coast right now, barely outside the visual range of their coastal lighthouses.
"If there's heavy civilian traffic off the coast of the Netherlands and they spot our fleet, and if any Britannian spies among them report our movements, the consequences would be severe."
Lelouch asked carefully. He didn't know the first thing about practical naval combat and was genuinely asking for guidance.
Seeing his humble yet inquisitive demeanor, Rear Admiral Hipper felt a degree of fondness for the clever young man. Having nothing better to do at the moment anyway, he generously explained:
"Of course I know that turning early increases the risk of being spotted by coastal vessels, but it's the lesser of two evils. We've already reached the eastern edge of the Dogger Bank waters. If we continue west, the water will become drastically shallower. The shallowest parts of Dogger Bank are only thirteen meters deep, and the deepest are no more than forty, with an average of twenty meters.
"Because these waters are so shallow, they can't hide submarines. The Empire's submarines are far more numerous and powerful than the enemy's, so whenever there's a stretch of water where submarines can't hide, the enemy grows rampant. In the Dogger Bank waters, there are countless enemy trawlers that act as the Britannian Navy's eyes and ears. Emboldened by the lack of submarines, they patrol the area in dense nets, radioing in the moment they spot our warships.
"Therefore, I had to turn early simply to avoid the shallows. As long as we stay in deep water, I can deploy allied submarines in advance to set up ambushes and keep watch along the way. If there's a genuine risk of discovery, we can have our vanguard destroyers or our ambushing submarines use low-power shortwave radios to issue a warning, or just sink them outright.
"In waters with active submarine operations, the enemy wouldn't dare casually send armed trawlers or military vessels disguised as civilian ships to conduct dragnet reconnaissance.
"Besides, it's already late October. The colder the weather, the heavier the fog over the North Sea. The morning fog barely clears by ten o'clock, and it gets dark by four-thirty in the afternoon. In this season, it's relatively easy to hide our movements.
"I've also deployed numerous destroyers in advance, casting them out like a net—scattering a few every fifty nautical miles from north to south. If they encounter the enemy, they'll fire their torpedoes if they can, then immediately run. This way, even if the enemy spots our vanguard scouts, they won't be able to guess whether capital ships are following behind them. When there's enemy activity everywhere, it's the same as having no enemy activity anywhere."
(Note: The image above is a map of the Dogger Bank waters. The red-circled area in the middle is extremely shallow, making it inaccessible to submarines, or rather, submarines arriving here would be forced to surface and become sitting ducks. As can be seen on Baidu Maps, the color of this sea area is noticeably lighter, formed by the convergence of sediment deposited by the River Thames and the Rhine River over millions of years.)
Hipper's explanation left Lelouch in deep admiration. As expected of one of the few great commanders in the Demanian Navy, his grasp of sneak attacks was rock solid.
Before every sortie, Hipper never bothered trying to completely hide the fact that he had set out, knowing full well it was impossible to conceal.
He would openly lay his cards on the table about his departure, only to then release a smokescreen of decoys, making it impossible for the enemy to determine his actual destination.
It was similar to aircraft in later eras dropping chaff when scanned by radar.
Chaff couldn't hide the fact that an aircraft was invading, but it created an ocean of false targets, masking the real target's exact location.
The most brilliant part was that Hipper hadn't prepared all of this in a rush; he had already set it up beforehand, intending to use it as a smokescreen for the bombardment of Yarmouth.
Now, he had merely changed his target at the last minute. The previously prepared smokescreens could be used directly without any adjustments, which was the only reason he could respond so swiftly and embark on this "spontaneous trip."
His luggage had been packed in advance; he had just swapped his ticket at the last second.
At this very moment, the Britannians certainly knew Hipper had vanished, but they had no idea where he would show up.
As long as he didn't collapse the wave function, he could exist in a quantum superposition of being both here and there.
As long as the jungler didn't show his face, he could appear in any lane.
Minister Warton assumed Hipper was going to gank the mid lane, hastily shifting Beatty from the top lane to the mid lane to counter-ambush, but Hipper had actually chosen to gank the bot lane.