graf zeppelin (kancolle)
グラーフ・ツェッペリン グラーフ・ツェッペリン(艦これ) グラーフ・ツェッペリン(艦隊これくしょん) パイオツェッペリン アクグラ
Lead ship of the Kriegsmarine's Graf Zeppelin-class aircraft carriers, as represented in Kantai Collection. Named for German aviation pioneer Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin.
Graf Zeppelin has a confident, militaristic, blunt, and stoic manner of speech. Her (official) art style has her looking quite cold and nearly monochrome, most likely to reflect on her historic counterpart's noncompletion. She is frequently seen in the company of the other German ships, especially Bismarck and Prinz Eugen, and occasionally as having a senpai-kouhai relationship with Akagi, from whom some of her flight deck design was copied. As her hourlies implies, she's an avid coffee drinker, making coffee up to four times between 10 pm to 7 am.
She has grey eyes in tsurime style. She has blonde hair with notable sidelocks and twintails, as well as hair dangling between her eyes.
She wears a white jacket that is unmistakably impossibly tight on her large breasts and even shows her navel. She also wears a capelet with red trim, a black-and-red necktie bearing a black (iron) cross, a black miniskirt, black pantyhose, black gloves and a peaked cap.
Her combat gear involves a split-hull design similar to KanColle battleships like Nagato. Unlike Japanese carriers, she carries no historical weapon representing aircraft launching, instead holding a small deck of two twin-cannon anti-air turrets like a pistol. Her hull also has twin-cannon turrets. Her carrier deck is carried on a robotic swing arm from the back of the hull that is attached to her back on a metal girdle.
Historically, she never saw any use, not being completed as the war began, and with Germany never managing to break far enough out into the sea to have any reason they couldn't just send aircraft from much more easily protected and repaired land bases. As such, her construction was essentially canceled while she was at her last stages, and she languished with nothing but a small maintenance team for most of the war. She also never particularly had any seriously produced carrier-based aircraft to complement her, although some variants of existing German land-based aircraft were designed. She was ultimately ordered to be scrapped by the Germans, captured by the Soviets, and was sunk as a practice target in 1947. Her wreck was discovered in 2006, under 260 ft of water just off Władysławowo, Poland.
The historic Graf Zeppelin was also notable for incorporating design flaws the other major powers had already learned to avoid. Graf Zeppelin's anti-shipping armament was 16 single-purpose 15 cm SK C/28 guns in 8 twin-mount casemates, at a time when other countries were arming their carriers with smaller dual-purpose guns to increase their anti-air coverage. These guns were of heavy cruiser size, numbered more than a heavy cruiser would carry for "commerce raiding operations" and would have required the carrier to come into direct surface engagement range to actually use. This was in fact the result of miscommunication with the ship's designer, who intended to save weight by using 4 twin-mount instead of 8 single-mount casemates; the builders thought that he was instead telling them to double the total number of guns. In game, though, this trait is the reason she's able to attack during night battles, unlike every other carrier in the game.