Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "World's Worst Warships - Book Review with Drach (Part 2 of 2)" video.

  1. With regard to the Condottieri-class cruisers and whether they earn their way onto to list of world's worst warships...the question is, which ones? The "Condottieri-class cruisers" are actually 5 distinct classes of light cruisers, that get grouped together because there's such a clear line of evolution in them. The Giussano and Cadorna classes were garbage, and a good case can be made that they were the worst Treaty-era cruisers. The Regia Marina was lucky that they only had to operate in the Mediterranean, because their belt armor is so thin I suspect a stiff breeze in the North Atlantic would've penetrated it. The Montecuccoli and Duca d'Aosta classes were quite adequate light cruisers, and the Abruzzi class was excellent.
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  2. There were light tanks with better protection than the Duquesne-class cruisers.
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  3.  @KestrelOwens  What came before pre-dreadnoughts were the ironclad battleships. Essentially, what defines a pre-dreadnought is that it's built and armored with steel, and has its main guns in modern-style turrets (meaning, a barbette with a armored casing on top) rather than the Coles and Erickson pattern turrets of the ironclad era turret ships. A dreadnought is simple enough: it dispenses with the large-caliber secondary guns of pre-dreadnoughts in favor of a uniform main battery. IIRC no dreadnoughts ever carried a secondary gun larger in caliber than 6 inches. They almost all had 12-inch main guns (with the exception of the initial German dreadnoughts, with 11-inch guns). There was also the transitional "semi-dreadnoughts", which used only big guns but not of uniform caliber (meaning there were no intermediate 6-inch, 8-inch etc guns in the secondary battery; they had 12-inch main guns and 10-inch or 9.2-inch secondaries). And this is where the super-dreadnoughts came in. Super-dreadnoughts are defined by their larger guns. The first of these, HMS Orion with 13.5-inch main guns entered service exactly 5 years and 1 month after HMS Dreadnought, and was 25% heavier and in terms of the weight of shells that could be fired in a broadside had double Dreadnought's firepower. This was considered almost as big a leap in battleship design as Dreadnought herself. And the size and firepower kept increasing from there, right up until the Washington Naval Treaty temporarily halted battleship construction.
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