Eugen_Pinak

Actually, Fujimoto (and not only he) was serious about his projects. As for this design, it probably was not a bargaining chip (if it was true - everybody at Washington would've heard about it) but a desperate attempt to replace "Nagato" class, if it was ordered scrapped by WNT. Of course, it's possible to have such a conversion - but the amount of work will be enormous and the cost will come closely to the half of the cost of the new battleship with the same armament.

Some more data is available here (in Russian).

There were NO triple turrets for those ships - only twins. Also every IJN battleship upgunned against the wishes of other participants of Washington conference will result in the renewal of naval race - which was certainly out of questions for than Japanese government Wrong. All parts of the "Fuso" were to be rebuilt, as two forward 41-cm turrets are way larger, than old 36-cm ones. BTW, this "design" also feature costly moving of the whole forward superstructure aft. No - this is not a catapult. This is launching platform, that had to be on the top of No 2 turret, not here. Actually, it would allow LESS space for machinery, not more. So speed will suffer greatly, which is, again, totally ahistorical. And why do you think, that you can squeezee 18,8-m 102-ton 41-cm gun into the turret, intended for 16,5-m 86-ton 36-cm gun? So we have here totally ahistorical design, which ignores not just basic historical realities, but also basic realities of shipbuilding (c.1000 extra tons of new turrets + larger diameter of turret wells in the narrow bow part of the ship = broken bow). PS. Yes, I know about plans for "Fuso" upgunning to 16-in guns in Hiraga's archive. But the same plans also provide for mighty increase of armour (from 4 inches to 9 in the upper part) as well as other upgrades, which means, that "Fuso" class was intended to become the main strike force of the IJN battleline. And this will require enormous rebuild of the ships, which was not made even during large modernisation during 1930th. The only reason for such an extravaganza is a refusal of other countries at Washington to allow IJN to keep "Mutsu".