Kartha-class battleship

The Kartha-class battleship was a class of five built for the Zusian Marinakorps, designed to be larger, better armored, and better armed than the preceding Zuncker-class battleships by sacrificing speed. With a displacement of over 72,000 tons at full load, they were the third-heaviest battleships ever constructed, as well as the largest, best-protected, and most heavily-armed Marinakorps battleships in history. The ships were armed with twelve 406 mm guns in four triple turrets, an increase from the nine guns in three turrets used by the Zuncker-class. They were also the only class in history to rival the Empire of Yamatai's immense Tenzan and Oyashima-class battleships in terms of tonnage. In keeping with Marinakorps traditions, the was named for the noble House of Kartha after they won the rights to help fund the ship's construction.

Preliminary design work for the Kartha-class originates before the start of the Endwar in Amphia. The first two vessels began construction in 1931 as part of Basilikar Arkadius VIII's massive rearmament programs. The Räichstag expanded the Marinakorps budget the very next year, and included as part of the expansion a requirement to build eight more ships of the class, which the Basilikar eagerly agreed to. Arkadius partly justified the ships as an explicit response to Yamatai's Tenzan-class, famously saying that the "Amphian races" had "fallen egregiously behind the Escaric races in the realm of naval warfare" and that such a condition was "intolerable." However, the success of carrier combat during the Endwar diminished the perceived value of the battleship, which led the Marinakorps to cancel the five remaining planned ships in 1938, in favor of carriers and anti-submarine vessels. During the course of the Endwar, two of the five were sunk in combat; the KSM Tolmar and the KSM Rhixen.

All three surviving Kartha-class ships were reactivated, modernized, and armed with missiles at the direction of Basilikar Alixander XVI in 1977, in response to the outbreak of the Third Kyrossic War. They served valiantly in the Third and Fourth Kyrossic Wars, but were costly to maintain and increasingly useless in modern warfare. The battleships were ultimately decommissioned during the Fourth War in 1995, to ensure their preservation. All three now serve as nonprofit in Zusea.