 It also built the three coastal defence battleships of the .In 1909 Rudolf Montecuccoli, chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, pressured STT (together with Škoda) to start work on two dreadnoughts, and , even though approval of the budget for them was held up in the Austro-Hungarian Reichstag – being concerned about Italy and France embarking on dreadnought projects of their own.Montecuccoli was compelled to resort to an intricate web of propaganda and deception to camouflage the fact that the new ships did not have Reichstag approval.