The Ersatz Yorck class was 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 guns as opposed to the 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 re