Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "HMS New Zealand - The Lucky Kiwi Capital Ship" video.

  1. Drac, I started looking in to the Courageous class "large light cruisers" some days ago. There are two narratives about them that I see repeated over and over: 1: they were built with shallow draft to operate in the Baltic. and, 2: they were converted to carriers because of the Washington treaty. I can't find any support for either of those narratives that makes any sense. As you point out in your piece on the Courageouses, the Germans could send any capital ships into the Baltic that they wanted via the Kiel Canal. If the Courageouses were the only big gun ships the RN could get into the Baltic, they would be dead meat when the entirety of the High Seas Fleet came over the horizon. If the RN could get other capital ships into the Baltic, there is no reason to build the Courageouses. The WNT appears to not regard the Courageouses as "capital ships". The Courageouses do not appear on the capital ship disposal list, nor the capital ship retention list, nor is there any verbiage that I can find in the treaty compelling their conversion. Why were the Courageouses built? One person on another forum has offered a scenario that makes sense: the Courageouses were built as cruiser killers that were small and cheap enough, in relative terms, to build in large quantity. That scenario has the virtue of making sense. The Courageouses cost a third less than the Renowns, and used fewer of the limited inventory of twin 15" turrets per ship, allowing more of them to be built. Have you ever heard of this alternative to the generally accepted scenarios?
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  2.  @madrabbit9007  iirc, no. The Washington treaty treated the fleets of the dominions as part of the RN. The disposal list in the treaty for the RN includes Australia, even though it was owned by Australia, not the UK.
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