Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "The Washington Naval Treaty - The parties, the motives, the negotiations, the loophole abuse..." video.

The WNT has provided hours of covid isolation entertainment. The Steve plan of tweaks: first, set the battleship maximums at what was already in commission. Setting gun size at 16" forced the Japanese to lie as the Nagatos had 16.1", so I would set the maximum at 16.1". Hood was far above the 35,000 ton limit, so I would set the individual ship tonnage where Hood was, according to treaty measure, 41,200. Because I hate waste, I would allow ships already in the water to be completed, provided that a corresponding tonnage of existing ships were eliminated. The cutoff date for what is "in the water" would be the same as the cutoff date for "experimental" aircraft carriers, November 12, 1921. This was done with Colorado and West Virginia, in exchange for the two Delawares. I would extend it to allow completion of Washington, at the cost of the two Floridas. I would give the UK the stink eye for crying about not having any 16" gun ships as the RN had a large number of ships with 15" guns while the bulk of the USN and IJN were armed with 14". The Japanese would feel pretty ill-used as Tosa and Kaga missed the "in the water" date by one month and by five days, respectively, so I might offer them the choice of scrapping the Tosas, or completing them, and scrapping three of the Kongos instead.
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@toddwebb7521 Battleccruisers were not treated as a separate class by the treaty. Whether to build a battlecruiser or a battleship was entirely up to the parties to the treaty. Personally, I loath the Nelsons, because they look odd and are slow. Hood was grandfathered as it was already in commission when the conference started. As I mentioned in my "tweaks" to the treaty, posted below, I would have set the capital ship displacement limit at Hood's displacement, to settle the issue.
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@stuross85 The WNT left the RN with more tonnage than the USN. While the quota for both USN and RN was the same, 525,000 tons, the actual retention list totals were far apart: 500,650 for the USN and 580,450 for the RN. The adjustments that allowed completion of Colorado, West Virginia and the Nelsons brought them closer: 525,850 for the USN, almost dead on the quota, and 558,950 for the RN, so the RN had about 33,000 tons, almost an entire treaty battleship more, than the USN. These tonnages are all in the treaty text. While the RN, with the Nelsons, had 2 BBs with 16" guns and the USN had 3, the RN had 13 ships with 15" guns and 5 with 13.5" guns, while the USN had 9 with 14" guns, though with more guns per ship, than the RN 15" BBs, and 4 with 12" guns. That's why, in my post below, I said I would tend to give the UK the stink eye about it's crying about not having any 16" ships. If I was dictating treaty terms, the RN would have scrapped Thunderer and Centurion, to bring it's initial tonnage down to 534,950, less than 10,000 tons over it's quota, and it could start building 16" ships when the treaty's planned replacement program started in the 1930s. So, for what it's worth, I agree with Admiral Sims.
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@RedXlV the RN drew up a wide variety of designs in the early 20s. I quite like the J3, which had 3-triple 15" turrets, in a conventional layout, and could make about 33kts. This would be a vastly more useful ship 20 years later, due to it's speed, as they could kill a Scharnhorst, and run down a Deutschland and turn it into hamburger before tea time. But the J3 displaced about 43,000 tons. Besides, the RN seems to have had a size obsession and demanded something with 16" guns.
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@RedXlV on converting the Admirals to carriers, the result would have been the same as with the Lexingtons: horribly inefficient ships that burn up the tonnage allotment. The problem seems to be the long, tapered stern that the battlecruisers need for speed. Look at a stern view of a Lexington. You can hardly tell it's the stern because it is so sharp, only flairing out just below the flight deck. That creates a ludicrously short hangar deck. Look at the sterns of other carriers, like a Yorktown or Ark Royal: the stern is narrow at the waterline, but broadens quickly above the waterline, to allow a longer hangar. imho, the RN chose wisely.
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@bookertamm3020 that ship has been "cabbed over". That was commonly done to obsolete ships to convert them to barracks or receiving ships. The USS Constitution spent some years like that too.
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@DubGathoni The most likely scenario would be additional ships would be scrapped according to their age. The treaty text is on line. Scroll down to the replacement schedules to see the sequence the additional ships would be scrapped in. For the IJN, the next ships up for the chop would be the Kongos, then the Fusos. For the USN, the Floridas then Wyomings. For the RN: the Iron Dukes, then Tiger.
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@RedXlV the scenario I proposed below would have set the tonnage limit per ship in the neighborhood of Hood, rather than 35,000 tons. As the real limiting factor was the total tonnage allocation to each party to the treaty, the tonnage of each ship only really matters if someone is obsessing about how many he has, and wants to make sure no-one else can have more. Otherwise, does it matter if a country has 4-43,750 ton ships vs 5-35,000 ton ships?
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