This is not. A battleship's guns far outrange a cruiser. That said, effective range might be closer as the Clevelands were built with much better radars and fire control, but a battleship's guns can still start shooting before a Cleveland's.
That's not how High Explosive ammunition works at all. HE ammo is just that: explosive. You need to hit something vital to start a fire. Showering a ship with HE would blow off a lot of the exterior fixtures, but it won't do jack in terms of causing fires unless they can penetrate enough to find something flammable.
Not if it can't penetrate enough to hit anything of worth it won't.
Only if: A) the turret suffers a catastrophic detonation, and B) the crew is stupid enough to leave the hatches open so the explosion spreads to the rest of the ship. Otherwise you've done damage, yes, but unlike in game a real ship can take plenty of damage to its combat effectiveness and still be in no danger of sinking.
The main battery guns on a pre-dread can elevate how much?
Wikipedia on 12"/45 Mark 5 gun as found on the Mississippi-class pre-dreads: 18,288 m at 15° elevation (20K yards)
I have no reason to believe the turrets of the Mississippi-class could elevate further, because "However, this range was largely academic at the time the gun was initially designed, as no rangefinding techniques had yet been developed capable of accurately firing beyond about 10,000 yd (9,100 m)"
Max range for Clevelands is on Wikipedia 26,118-yard (23,882 m) at 47.5° elevation (thinner atmosphere at higher altitude = less drag)
Effective range is still give as 20K yards though.
So yes there is a range advantage by fire control if nothing else. Just like in the Yamato vs Iowa debates on anything that's not calm seas, clear day.
There's the problem of "Everything above the armoured deck is concussed to hell, including the gun mounts, so your fire is impotent", even without replacing the HE ammo with incendiary ammo.
Penetrating is not necessarily required to silence a warship. Bismarck's turret faces come to mind.
Enough armoured cruisers have been maimed from secondary ammo stowage going off that it wouldn't be a shock if pre-dreads could be hurt badly by it.
Then, after all the weapons are silenced and the superstructure completely ruined, the cruiser can close the range somewhat safely to knock out the main guns by gun mounting hits.
EDIT: Let's stop this off-topic chat, unless Sky wants to pit escaped Greek ships against Italian cruisers or something
