Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "The Drydock - Episode 020" video.

Monarch rather famously is historically implausible, because it retains the amidships catapult, yet has lattice masts that not even Vanguard stayed in active service long enough to receive. (Belfast received such masts in her 1956 refit, a year after Vanguard was placed into reserve.) There's also the fact that she's ostensibly Design 15C, but her hull is a direct copy-paste of King George V. The actual Design 15C had various differences in detail from the finalized Design 14P, rather than being the same ship except with 3x3 15-inch instead of 2x4 and 1x2 14-inch. Kii's configuration in World of Warships is straight-up nonsense. An IJN dreadnought serving through the 1930s and into WW2 without torpedo bulges being added? Absolutely never would've happened. It's also completely unbelievable that Japan would ever cut out a section of a battleship's hull to install a set of cruiser-style torpedo launchers. Every battleship they had placed torpedoes on previously had them removed during those same 1930s refits that the WoWS version of Kii inexplicably never went through. Everything above Kii's weather deck is fairly plausible if you accept the premise of the war lasting an extra couple of years (or perhaps the war starting a year or two later than in reality) and this particular ship surviving long enough to get 10cm Type 98s and reverse-engineered 40mm Bofors installed. This was one of the most disappointing "paper ships" in the game to me, because by comparison Amagi seems like a very authentic version of what the ship would've looked like had she been completed as a battlecruiser and served into WW2.
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The reason why I can't see any Anglo-American War happening is the lack of any actual points of contention between the US and UK in the 1920s. Combined with the fact that the British population had no appetite for further war less than a decade after WW1. Plus, the UK had already decided to shift from alliance with Japan to alliance with the US even before WW1 ended. This was why, for example, they literally provided the complete blueprints of HMS Hood (at the time the most powerful and advanced warship in the world) to the US Navy and recommended that they should build similar ships. Regarding torpedoes on cruisers, given how bad the American torpedoes actually were in the late 1930s, the USN didn't really lose much by ditching them from cruiser designs. While the Japanese "long lance" torpedoes, those were a double-edged sword since they had a tendency to explode catastrophically if hit while still in their tubes. That's how Choukai was lost, for example. At the hands of an escort carrier's 5"/38 AA gun, which is a pretty embarrassing way for a heavy cruiser to be disabled. Also, you left out USS Wichita from pre-war cruisers. She would have better armor than both Takao and the Towns, and also better guns.
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