Those of you who went to the Theale Show last weekend will have seen the 3D print of Lutzow that I have produced. Lutzow carried a large number of different paint schemes during WW2, probably as a result of spending a lot of time in dockyard hands. Operationally, she was probably the least successful member of the class and I wondered why, so I sent time reading up on reports of the careers of all three ships. The tactic employed when sighting other ships at sea was to approach merchantmen head on so that an enemy could not easily identify the ship until it was at point blank range and then unfurl a banner across the bridge telling the merchantman to stop engines and not to use their radio. Graf Spee used this tactic with the British Cruisers at the Battle of the River Plate because she expected to see a convoy and mistook the cruisers for destroyer escorts. If she had realized that she was facing a superior force, she would have turned and made off at her best speed. In both cases only one turret of three guns could have ranged on the enemy and she could only fire on one target at once. Why, then, do the battle reports say that she never fired the three guns in a ladder to obtain the correct range? In WW1 the Germans used ladder firing and obtained the correct range much more quickly the the Royal Navy did with salvo patterns and the end of WW1 all navies had learned the lesson (in theory). Can anyone tell me why these ships performed so badly in gun battles during WW2? The answer might not help me to make better models but it may stop my mind from wandering when I am painting fancy patterns on small ship models!