Re: Big guns on small ships

On Tue, 16 Dec 1997, Tim Jones wrote:

> I'd be interested as an aside which ships these were.

A couple of coastal monitors, mostly used for gunnery training,
and possibly shore bombardment. Certainly never saw any surface combat 
worthy of note. They weren't called coastal for nothing either,
I don't think they were all that seaworthy. Slow as hell, certainly.

A couple of monitors saw combat in WWI, if you count bombarding
a holed-up-in-river-delta german cruiser.

> However it was not 'that' common and a lot of British Navy
> Cruisers in the early years were about 8 inch.

That, OTOH, is almost entirely due to the Naval treaties of the era.
Anything with guns larger than 8 inches was classified as a capital,
and restricted under treaty.

> I don't quite understand you here, are we talking about WWII or FT?

I agree... you shouldn't think too strongly in terms of parallels.
Look at the present situation: Destroyer and cruiser are used almost 
interchangeably, more an indication of function than size.

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