High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The Ersatz Yorck class were a group of three battlecruisers ordered for the Imperial German Navy in April 1915. The name derived from the fact that the lead ship was intended as a replacement (German: ersatz) for the armored cruiser Yorck lost to mines in 1914. They were a slightly enlarged version of the Mackensen class battlecruiser, armed with 38 cm (15 in) guns as opposed to the 35 cm (13.8 in) weapons on the preceding design. The boilers would have been trunked into a single massive funnel. The three ships were originally ordered as part of the Mackensen class but the design was changed when details of the British Admiral class battlecruisers became known to German intelligence. The vessels were ordered under the provisional names Ersatz Yorck, Ersatz Gneisenau, and Ersatz Scharnhorst. They were considered to be replacements for the armored cruisers SMS Yorck, which had been sunk by German mines in 1914, and Gneisenau and Scharnhorst, both of which had been sunk at the Battle of the Falkland Islands also in 1914.