Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "USS Texas in Drydock - 2023 (Lets go inside!)" video.
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In the January 2023 livestream, as part of your answer to my question regarding the utility in WWII of giant cruisers with all the 6-or-8-inch guns, you stated that, if you tried to use a cruiser with thirty-two 6-inch guns as essentially an "anti-destroyer machine gun" (incidentally, I quite like that turn of phrase, and would like to borrow it if you don't mind), it would have to close to within torpedo range of the enemy destroyers in order to bring its 6-inch battery to bear.
That got me thinking, because one of the main jobs of a large warship's secondary armament is to pick off, or at least drive away, enemy destroyers and torpedo boats before they can get close enough to launch their torpedoes, and the secondary guns of these heavy ships are usually only 4-to-5.25-inchers; even on ships with a split secondary battery, with lighter guns for AA work and heavier ones for fighting light surface forces, the anti-surface secondaries still only go up to the 5.5-to-6-inch range of calibers. None of these guns have a significantly longer range than light-cruiser main guns to (and most are considerably shorter in range), so, if enemy destroyer torpedoes outrange the main battery of the aforementioned 32-gun light cruiser, they should easily outrange the secondary guns of whatever ship they want to attack.
Wouldn't that make these secondary guns near-useless in the anti-surface role (which, again, is one of their primary roles, and their only role in ships with a split secondary battery) against anything armed with torpedoes, requiring a switch to even-heavier secondaries (say, a battery of 8-inch guns) to keep enemy ships out of torpedo range (and thereby also rendering dual-purpose secondaries obsolete, due to the inability of guns with a caliber beyond about 5.5 inches to effectively serve as heavy AA in the absence of technical advances that only became available postwar)? Why did navies stick with relatively-light secondaries even though these could no longer stop enemy vessels from closing to torpedo range?
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