Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "The Origins of the Torpedo - That which lurks beneath..." video.
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While you were answering a question of mine in the January 2023 livestream, you said that attempting to use a cruiser with 32 6-inch guns as an "anti-destroyer machine gun" (a turn of phrase I quite like) wouldn't work, since it'd have to get close enough to the destroyers to run the risk of torpedo attack.
The secondary batteries of WWII-era capital ships and cruisers have, as either their sole function (for ships with dedicated anti-surface secondaries) or one of their two main functions (for ships with dual-purpose secondaries), the fending off of enemy destroyers before they can get into torpedo range.
If a broadside of 32 6-inch guns can't reliably stop a destroyer before it enters torpedo range, how can ten 5-inch guns, or nine 6.1-inch guns, or eight 5.25-inch guns, or six 6-inch guns, or six 5.5-inch guns, possibly be sufficient for anti-destroyer work? Doesn't this mean that not a single capital ship in WWII had a secondary battery that was actually useful in the anti-surface role? And doesn't that invalidate the entire dual-purpose-gun concept (at least for WWII), since reliably killing destroyers before they enter torpedo range requires a gun considerably larger than 6 inches in caliber - much too large to be useful as a heavy-AA weapon before the advances of the immediate postwar era?
If battleship design and construction had continued longer, would we have seen the return of the 8-inch-and-up intermediate battery for anti-surface work in response to the increasingly-long ranges of destroyer torpedoes?
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