Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "Town class cruisers - Guide 090" video.

  1. Belfast is a good example of how much of factor luck is in determining which historic ships get preserved. The Imperial War Museum was looking to preserve one of the 6-inch triple turrets from a cruiser, and when they visited HMS Gambia (one of the other cruisers still in reserve) somebody suggested they should preserve the entire ship instead. But it turned out that Gambia was in rather poor condition, and Belfast was in the best shape of the surviving cruisers so she got selected instead. And then the government refused to pay for her preservation, and it was only because her last captain happened to be a Member of Parliament in 1970 that the Royal Navy even allowed her to be preserved with private funds.
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  2. In 1940 there were design studies for post-treaty heavy cruisers with 3x3 8-inch guns, comparable to the US Navy's Baltimore-class. And even super-heavy cruisers with 3x3 or even 3x4 9.2-inch guns (it's unclear whether this would've been a new gun design, or the the old 9.2"/47 from WW1 armoured cruisers and coastal artillery batteries). During his time as First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill was the driving force behind the latter concept. But even without treaty limitations, Britain's shipbuilding capacity was finite and there was a large demand for both cruisers and destroyers to patrol their vast empire. The (nominally 8,500 ton) Crown Colony-class cruisers and the follow-up 8,800 ton Minotaur/Swiftsure-class could be built cheaper and in greater numbers than any post-treaty heavy cruiser, so that's what Britain went with. Toward the end of the war, the Royal Navy was looking to build 15,000 ton cruisers, but these would've still been "light" cruisers because they'd successfully developed a dual-purpose 6-inch gun, the QF 6 inch Mark N5. World of Warships players know those designs as Neptune and Minotaur, which were in fact the names the Royal Navy planned to use for them. But then the war ended and the Royal Navy no longer had the budget to afford them. Several of the turrets had already been built, though, so three incomplete Swiftsure-class cruisers were fitted with 2 turrets each as the Tiger-class.
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  3. Do any drawings exist of what the quad turret version of Edinburgh would've looked like? In particular, I'm wondering whether those quad turrets would've retained the staggered barrels of the triple turrets.
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