Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Kongo Replacements (1931) - Guide 380" video.

With regard to Hiraga's design, not only were the 6" secondary turrets nominally dual purpose with that 75° elevation, one of the oddest parts is that so were the casemates. To allow for this, as you can see in Hiraga's scale mockup, the casemates are actually semi-turrets with their roofs extending partially outside of the weather deck. Since that's the only way such high elevation would be possible in a casemate.
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@schullerandreas556 Such a fight would've probably gone very badly for Tiger and Blake. Not merely because of their turrets being lightly armored, but because by that point each of them only had one turret due to being converted into helicopter cruisers. Their autoloading 6" guns were faster-firing than General Belgrano's manually loaded ones, but not by nearly enough to make up for the disparity in barrel count. With only Tiger and Blake, you've got 4 guns each firing at best 20 rounds per minute. Whereas Belgrano had 15 guns that could fire 8-10 rounds per minute. Even if we assume Belgrano's gun crew was subpar and didn't load the guns as fast they were designed for, and that Tiger and Blake had everything working perfectly, there's just no getting around the "15 guns vs 4 guns" issue. For this to be a remotely winnable fight for the British cruisers, you'd need HMS Lion (C34) to somehow not have been scrapped in 1975 and instead also be operational. At that point you actually have enough barrels between the three sisters that their superior rate of fire would make up for Belgrano's superior barrel count. And also the advantage of having your firepower spread across three ships that could fire on Belgrano from different angles. But Belgrano would still be much better-armored.
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@Norbert_Sattler I'm pretty sure it's because of how Hiraga went to extremes to create a compact citadel in that design. The hull isn't narrowing at that point, but the citadel is.
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