Comments by "Vikki McDonough" (@vikkimcdonough6153) on "HMS Minotaur (1906) - Guide 348" video.
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@dougjb7848 So? The treaty cruisers were just as bad, if not worse, in terms of torpedo protection (it was flat-out impossible to work in better protection within a 10,000-ton limit), especially since a Minotaur refit would be able to take advantage of the extra 2,000-ton allowance provided in the Washington treaty for adding underwater protection to legacy warships, plus the (probably-considerable) weight savings from the engine and main-armament refits, and gain some pretty-extensive anti-torpedo bulging.
With their maximum belt thickness of 6 inches, they also would've been considerably better protected against incoming shellfire than most treaty heavy cruisers (which generally had side belts topping out in the 3.75-to-5-inch thickness range).
And finally, given the large numbers of ships from various navies that were successfully given large speed boosts by upgrading their machinery, I'm confident the Royal Navy would've been able to do the same with a hypothetical 1920s Minotaur refit without facing any unsurmountable problems.
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@ROBERTN-ut2il Actually, London, Paris, and Rome would've had no reason to do these studies historically, as modernizing their legacy ACRs was already firmly off the table for various reasons; the British'd already disposed of all their legacy ACRs by the time Washington rolled around, and the French and Italians were too broke following WWI to modernize any of their legacy ACRs unless they wanted to forego building new heavy cruisers.
That leaves the U.S. and Japan as the only countries that could potentially modernize their ACRs, and these also happen to have been the countries whose ACRs were the worst candidates (by quite a margin!) for modernization.
You see, the last generation of armored cruisers fell into two distinct design lineages. One, exemplified by the American and Japanese ACRs, kept the classic layout of a few big guns and a relatively-small-caliber secondary battery, and increased their firepower over that of previous designs by making the big guns even bigger (hence the twin 10-inchers on the Tennessees and the twin 12-inchers on the Tsukubas); the other, which can be termed the "semidreadnought" approach to the armored cruiser and which was exemplified by the British, French, and Italian ACRs, kept the main battery the same as previously, at least caliberwise (except for the Italians, who also increased the caliber of their last-generation ACRs' main battery, with the result that the Pisas and San Giorgios ended up being essentially second-class semidreadnought battleships) and replaced the secondary battery with a heavy intermediate battery (the French went the furthest along this line of design, merging the main and intermediate batteries into a large uniform 7.6-inch main battery in the Edgar Quinets). The semidreadnought ACRs could've been modernized to have very large uniform heavy batteries by replacing their heaviest guns with more intermediate-battery-caliber guns, while the American-Japanese style would always have underwhelming main batteries even if modernized.
Comparing a modernized Tennessee with a modernized Minotaur illustrates just how much of a better candidate the semidreadnought ACR is for modernization: compared to the contemporary new-build 8-inch treaty cruisers, the modernized Tennessee has slightly-above-average belt armor (5 inches max) and a bottom-of-the-line main-battery broadside (6 8-inch guns in a pair of triple turrets, each replacing one of the two original 10-inch twin turrets), whereas the modernized Minotaur has top-of-the-line belt armor (6 inches max) and a top-of-the-line main-battery broadside (11 7.5-inch guns in two triple and five single turrets, with each triple turret replacing one of the two original 9.2-inch twin turrets and the five single turrets being those that formerly made up the intermediate battery), and is also faster than the modernized Tennessee (assuming the two ships' machinery refreshes increase each ship's available horsepower by the same proportion).
It's certainly true that a rebuilt and modernized Tennessee would've been a slow, weakly-armed, not-particularly-thickly-skinned deathtrap. But that's because, of the last-generation armored cruisers, the Tennessees were probably the worst possible candidates for modernization. Had the Royal Navy not scrapped their entire ACR fleet between the Armistice and Washington, the surviving Minotaurs would've been far, far superior ships to modernize in the 1920s - but, sadly, they both went to the breakers before this could happen.
Finally, "my naval-design staff are competent" isn't always a safe thing to assume, given some of the just-plain-awful designs people were cranking out around this time (Lexington, Pensacola, Duquesne, I'm looking at you...).
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