H-40 was a real concept, though never realized; the 1930s Kriegsmarine had a plan on the books for a battleship class armed with 16-inch guns, the "H-39" type, and two of them had been ordered and laid down when World War II began. These were designated H-39 and H-40 for shipyard purposes, but would have received proper names if they had been completed. As it was, they were scrapped on the ways to reclaim the steel for higher-priority uses.

Later in the war, there were the usual steadily escalating, hilariously inflated, utterly unrealizable plans for battleships H-41 through H-44, the last of which would have been an 1,100-foot, 130,000-ton mobile landmass armed with eight 20-inch guns. (By comparison: Yamato, the largest and most powerful battleship ever actually built, was 836 feet long, displaced 71,000 tons, and had nine 18.1" guns. The H-44 proposal would have been roughly as long as, and a World War I battleship heavier than, a modern Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier.)

Of course, by that point, the Germans couldn't come up with enough steel to build a good-sized garden shed, and nobody ever even attempted to actually build any of the H-ships, but still. The typical "Hitler at the height of his speed freak phase" sort of concept. Even the Fog didn't try to copy that, but they did somehow learn of the H-39 and H-40. Possibly the deciding factor there was that they had started being constructed. No one knows how the Fog acquired their information about 20th-century ships or decided which ones to imitate.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
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