Freebird
Master Sergeant
It would have been interesting to see how that panned out - AFAIK, no BC was ever actually used as a commerce raider .
I know it's a different era, but Scharnhort and Gneisenau were employed as commerce raiders during WWII with some luck.
Viking beat me to it, the German BC's did commerce raiding...
Also the "PocketBB's" could be seen as a sort of cut-down BC, very effective for commerce raiding. They were listed as 28 knts, same as the older BC's, and the 11" guns could overpower the light cruisers that usually defended a convoy.
The raid in the South Atlantic by Scheer was quite profitable, IIRC it sunk 19 ships
As originally designed, they were not intended to serve in the line of battle - much like the BC again.
And the BC did make sense when it was originally designed, as the British were much more worried about commerce raiders pre-WWI, so having some BC "cruiser killers" was a good idea, especially in the era before AircraftCarriers. The effectivness of the BC's was demonstrated in the Falklands.
It was just the folly of the admiralty in putting them in the battle line for Jutland that caused the problem, something they were not designed for.