As Oskar and Karl stepped back out into the cold, leaving the warmth of Krupp's office behind, his mind replayed the substance of the meeting in a tighter, clearer loop.
Krupp, as Margarethe had repeatedly emphasized, had just finished perfecting their 280mm naval gun. A superb weapon by contemporary standards—fast-firing, accurate, with armor-piercing performance that in some cases even surpassed older British 305mm guns.
Under normal circumstances, that would've been enough.
For him, it wasn't.
He'd seen how the story went once already.
In the original timeline, the German Navy's first dreadnoughts—Nassau and her sisters—were stuck with 280mm guns while the British quickly climbed through 305mm, then 343mm, then 381mm. German guns were often better, but the calibers on paper always looked smaller. And in doctrine, psychology, and long-range gunnery, numbers on paper mattered.
He wanted that changed.
He wanted 305mm, fifty-caliber barrels in triple turrets. Nine heavy guns per ship. A broadside that would hit like a freight train.
To Margarethe and her engineers, it had sounded borderline insane:
Triple 305mm?
Fifty calibers long?
They'd never built anything like it.
Their current main gun line stopped at 280mm/45 for warships.
The engineers worried about muzzle blast interference, accuracy degradation, manufacturing difficulty; Margarethe had pointed out—with brutal honesty—that the development costs alone could swallow any profit from his order.
Oskar, in turn, had pushed back with three things:
Volume – At least twelve turrets in the first phase alone. Thirty-six guns. And more to follow if the ships performed as he knew they would.
Race with Britain – The British were almost certainly finalizing new 305mm models and already thinking about bigger ones. If Germany didn't leap now, it would fall permanently behind in caliber.
Shared fate – If Germany lost the next war, Krupp would lose more than a research budget; they'd lose markets, contracts, and likely their entire position.
The Krupp dynasty and the German Empire were chained together.
If the Empire drowned, the house of Krupp went under with it.
In that light, his demand no longer looked like a spoiled prince's tantrum. It looked like… a necessary gamble.
He wasn't asking them to reinvent physics, only to move faster than they otherwise would. His drawings gave them 90% of the concept: turret layout, barrel length, general dimensions, recoil estimates, armor requirements. The "master pen" work was done. Now the master steelmakers only had to turn lines into metal.
Margarethe hadn't answered immediately. She had weighed:
the cost of new tooling,
the strain on their engineers,
the risk of failure,
against:
the potential of a long-term turret and gun program,
the prestige of being first in the Empire with a true triple 305mm,
the opportunity to tie themselves even closer to a prince who might, in time, shape German naval policy by sheer force of money.
In the end, she had agreed.
Cautiously, with conditions, but she had agreed.
They would try.
And when she'd asked if he could guarantee that these battleships of his would actually be accepted by the Navy, he'd answered with straight-faced confidence:
"If they are not, I owe His Majesty two hundred million marks. I always repay my debts."
A huge sum for most men.
For him, it was terrifying but survivable.
For the Navy, it was a free battleship class.
For Krupp, it was an insurance policy: even if the Admirals hesitated, the Prince had already committed.
As they reached the steps, Oskar found himself repeating a phrase he'd dropped inside almost casually:
Caliber is everything.
Bigger barrels. Longer reach. Heavier shells.
Against British ships that chased speed and firepower at the expense of armor, a properly built German heavy gun would turn them into what his Chinese brain unhelpfully described as "dumplings with thin skin and lots of filling."
He smiled to himself at the image.
"Karl," he said quietly as they neared the car, "if this works… Krupp will forge the guns, we'll forge the ships, and the Admirals will have no excuse left."
Karl adjusted his coat, still slightly breathless from everything.
"If it works, Your Highness," he replied, "we won't just be selling tickets and helmets. We'll be selling the future of the German fleet."
Oskar nodded.
The deals were made, the seeds were planted for big guns and much more. In naval warfare, bigger always meant something.
All other things equal, a larger-caliber main gun gave you more reach, more punch, more psychological weight. Ships were judged by the size of the holes they could punch in steel.
Oskar hoped fervently that Bertha, and the men who would eventually run Krupp under her name, understood that.
In the history he remembered from his other life, the German Navy had always lagged a half-step behind Britain in caliber:
German ships: 280mm, then 305mm, then 380mm.
British ships: 305mm, then 343mm, then 381mm.
German guns had often been better built—better fuses, better shells, better metallurgy—but on paper, in foreign newspapers and Admiralty tables, it still looked like:
> "The British guns are bigger."
And that mattered.
It mattered for funding, for morale, for naval doctrine, for how battles were fought when admirals sat around tables and moved little wooden ships on maps.
If, in that old world, Germany had matched Britain from the start—305 for 305, 343 for 343—
how much more brutally would the battle of Jutland have gone?
Now, at least, he had a chance to bend that line.
He had given Krupp two years.
Two years to turn his "impossible" triple 305mm/50 design from pen strokes into steel. Two years that lined up neatly with his own plans:
The expansion of Deutsche Werke would finish in the second half of the coming year.
Only then would they lay the keels of the first Nassau-class hulls.
For a yard with no battleship experience, two years from keel to launch would already be ambitious.
By the time those hulls were ready to be armed, Krupp's new guns would be, too—if Margarethe and her engineers did what they'd promised.
A good battleship, he reminded himself, was a three-point equation:
Firepower. Armor. Speed.
Overbuild one, and you strangled the other two.
With Krupp on board for guns and armor, the first two corners were in motion. That left the third.
Speed.
Speed lived in the belly of the ship, in boilers and turbines.
In his remembered history, German ships had often been well-protected and accurate—and just a bit too slow. Good enough to survive, not always fast enough to choose the terms of battle.
Not this time.
His own "Nassau" design called for oil-fired boilers feeding steam turbines. Maximized power. Higher sustained speeds. Longer range.
He'd already started moving the pieces:
When British Parsons turbines were politically impossible to buy, he'd quietly turned toward the Curtiss steam turbine in the United States—underappreciated, underfunded, and ideal prey for a German prince with money.
He'd sent men across the Atlantic with offers that a struggling American firm couldn't refuse. If they brought back drawings, patents, prototypes—even partially flawed ones—German engineers could iterate from there.
Take an underfed idea from one world, feed it with Ruhr coal and Krupp steel, and watch it grow into something dangerous.
That was the plan.
Boilers were another piece.
Germany had coal, not oil. That was the eternal argument. Coal from the Ruhr was safe; oil had to come by ship from places that might not stay friendly.
But oil-fired boilers were better. Cleaner. Hotter. Denser in energy. Faster to refuel. Simpler to stoke.
He intended to force the transition anyway.
He'd sent word already to Sulzer—the continent's top marine boiler and engine builder—to take on a large order of 48 oil-fired boilers. Enough for his planned ships, plus spares, plus room for experimentation.
It would cost him.
It would also drag European boiler technology forward by years. Sulzer would pour money into R&D for his "special German contract," then turn around and sell the improved designs across the world. They'd grow rich; he'd grow powerful.
As they walked down the steps toward the waiting Mercedes, another thread slid into place in his mind.
Guns and armor: Krupp.
Boilers: Sulzer.
Turbines: Curtiss-turned-German.
Engines?
That, he wanted for himself.
Not just for ships.
For cars.
For aircraft.
For tanks and submarines he could already see in the mist of the future.
He'd already filed the paperwork.
Deutsche Power Systems.
A new company on paper—just a name, an empty shell, a room in Berlin with a desk and a very confused temporary secretary.
But in his plans, it would become:
the heart of German engines,
builders of ship turbines,
designers of submarine diesels,
creators of the powerplants that would drive everything from trucks to aircraft.
It only lacked one thing:
A mind big enough to anchor it.
In his old world, that mind had belonged to a man from Augsburg—
Rudolf Diesel.
Genius.
Inventor of the diesel engine.
A man brilliant enough to change how humanity burned fuel, and fragile enough that history had eaten him alive.
In the history he remembered, Diesel had died poor and troubled, falling—or jumping—from a ship in the North Sea in 1913.
Oskar had no intention of letting that happen again.
He reached the car, one hand on the door handle, and looked briefly at his reflection in the glass: tall, uniformed, jaw set, eyes tired but burning.
"Karl," he said quietly, "once we're done in Berlin, we're going to Augsburg."
Karl glanced up at him.
"Augsburg, Your Highness? What for?"
Oskar's smile was thin and full of intent.
"To steal a genius," he said. "And build an engine empire before the rest of the world realizes it needs one."
He opened the door.
Time to go from steel and guns to steam and fuel.
The foundations of his future fleet—and everything that would follow it—were now in motion.