Comments by "" (@BobSmith-dk8nw) on "Drachinifel"
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OK ... here's where you were right and are now wrong.
You have Destroyers, Cruisers, Battle Cruisers and Battleships. That's it.
If it is bigger than a Cruiser and smaller than Battleship - it IS a Battle Cruiser.
You have people who want to take things like machine guns - and create these non-existent categories and then shove things around in them to make further refinements in their classification.
Thus - what you really had was Light Machine Guns, Medium Machine Guns and Heavy Machine Guns.
Rifle Caliber Machine guns are all Light Machine Guns whether they are magazine fed or belt fed. Heavy Machine Guns are larger caliber Machine guns of about 13mm. Medium Machine guns are typically Light Machine Guns with some qualification - such as being water cooled.
See? Nice, simple categories. None of this bull shit about Universal Machine Guns, General Purpose Machine Guns where people are purposely creating new categories just so they can create new categories and further refine them - when it isn't needed. Just as further ship categories - just to have more highly refined categories - isn't needed.
Why?
Because it isn't worth while to just make up new categories just so you can shoe horn different ships into them.
Why?
Because at this point - if what you are trying to do is come up with is a further refinement of their definition - it is more accurate to simply refer them them not by their category - but by their individual designations - that is - their Class. Why come up with a more refined definition of their category for a two or three ship class?
I mean - how many "Large Cruisers" were there? Why come up with yet another class to refer to the Deutschlands? In both cases you could just call them Alaska's or Deutschlands? If you want increased accuracy - don't make up some new category - just refer them by their class.
Thus
A Scharnhorst, An Alaska, A Kongo, A Deutchland, A Dunkerque, A Renown and THE Hood could all be lumped into the Battle Cruiser class if you wanted to.
You could also say - that there were no WWII Battle Cruisers other than the Renowns which were of course - a WWI design.
Many of the former Battle Cruisers such as the Lexington and the Courageous classes - had been converted to Aircraft Carriers. The Kongo's were converted to Battleships and the Hood was always a fast Battleship.
Now - another factor in this - is that their guns do not have to be considered relative to the guns on contemporary Battleships. They could just be absolute categories. Thus - anything with an 11" gun or better that wasn't a Battleship in it's day - WAS a Battle Cruiser - regardless of when it was built. After all - 11" and 12" guns - were still used during WWII.
The Scharnhorsts were certainly NOT Battleships - although - they are called Battleships. These ships WOULD have had larger guns if the larger guns had been ready and it was ALWAYS planned that they would get larger guns. It just never happened.
The Kongos should never have been reclassified as Battleships - since they really ... really ... were not ... as Washington demonstrated.
As to the Iowa's ... they are more like the Queen Elisabeth's were in their day and rightly considered more Fast Battleships than Battle Cruisers.
The REAL reason for all this arguing about what's a Battle Cruiser and what isn't ... is that Naval Nerds love to argue about things and this is a subject so sloppy as to be Irresistible
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Irresistible_(1898)
to argument.
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