SS Great Eastern
She also had six masts (said to be named after the days of a week – Monday being the fore mast and Saturday the spanker mast), providing space for of sails (7 gaff and max. 9 (usually 4) square sails), rigged similar to a topsail schooner with a main gaff sail (fore-and-aft sail) on each mast, one "jib" on the fore mast and three square sails on masts no. 2 and no. 3 (Tuesday & Wednesday); for a time mast no. 4 was also fitted with three yards. In later years, some of the yards were removed. According to some sources she would have carried . This amount of canvas is obviously too much for seven fore-and-aft sails and max. 9 square sails. This (larger) figure of sail area lies only a few square metres below that the famous Flying P-Liner "Preußen" carried – with her five full-rigged masts of 30 square sails and a lot of stay sails. Setting sails turned out to be unusable at the same time as the paddles and screw were under steam, because the hot exhaust from the five (later four) funnels would set them on fire. Her maximum speed was 24 km/h (13 knots).
Ersatz Yorck-class battlecruiser
"Vizeadmiral" (Vice Admiral) Reinhard Scheer, the commander of the High Seas Fleet, expressed his preference for GK2, the largest and fastest of the versions (with a top speed of ), during a meeting on 29 April. Some consideration was given to the idea that the new battlecruiser design should represent a merging of the battleship and battlecruiser types—what was later termed a "fast battleship"—a concept Wilhlem II had been pushing for years. The so-called ""grosskampfschiff"" (large combat ship) would simplify construction and design work, but "Konteradmiral" Georg Hebbinghaus, the head of the General Navy Department, pointed out that under the German Naval Laws, such a change would not be permitted and that the laws would need to be rewritten to allow the new type. Hebbinghaus nevertheless allowed that the design staff had some leeway in warship development that could be used get around the legal restrictions.
In a meeting on 12 August, Hebbinghaus stated that he wanted to build ships that hewed closer to traditional battleship designs, preferring survivability to offensive power; he argued that the "Mackensen"s should be cancelled in favor of this new type, since they had been designed before the navy had any war experience on which to base them. Capelle stated that the last three "Mackensen"s—"Ersatz Yorck", "Ersatz Scharnhorst", and "Ersatz Gneisenau"—and "Ersatz Friedrich Carl" if work had not proceeded too far along, and that they should be reordered as a completely new design, GK6, which he submitted. This design called for a ship armed with eight 38 cm guns on a displacement of with a top speed of . Scheer objected to the decrease in speed, and for the time being, Hebbinghaus's and Capelle's proposals came to nothing. Another meeting on 24 August concluded that all seven ships of the "Mackensen" class would be built as designed, the General Department noting that they would "still undoubtedly represent a very valuable addition to the fleet in 1919."