Indestructible Spirit (Kancolle AU)

[Skywalker_T-65]

So, basically, this omake series will be focusing on the Baltic?

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For the most part. More specifically focused on Sedylitz and her twin, which means occasional bits in the North Sea or what have you. But mostly in the Baltic, yes.

Basically, this. The United States converted what would have been its BCs into fleet carriers. Japan did the same with Amagi and Akagi, except the earthquake happened, so only Akagi survived to be converted; Kaga was converted in Amagi's place. The Kongo-class was overhauled into being quasi-fast BBs. AFAIK, only the British still retained actual battlecruisers by WW2...and two of them were sunk in a rather one-sided fashion whilst deployed against enemies it was explicitly not designed to go against, while a third was overhauled and up-armored. I honestly have no idea if battlecruisers were ever employed in the role they were specifically designed for. Granted, Germany's battlecruisers were seemingly employed in the same mistaken fashion, but only once AFAIK.

It's especially ironic, since battlecruisers would have been useful in WW2...as escorts for fleet carriers (which were so fast that only fast battleships could keep up with them...or battlecruisers) and as gunboats (for shore bombardment, as the USN used its battleships for frequently, and the IJN used its battleships for a grand total of once, IIRC).

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German BCs were an...odd...case. They were designed for the same role as Brit ones, but I've always considered them as proto Fast-BBs more than proper BCs. German ones were oftentimes armored almost at BB levels. Much more heavily armored than equivalent Brit ones. There is a reason Seydlitz survived Jutland, to say the least. They were designed to stand in battle if needed, but I don't think they were intended to.

For example, chronologically speaking:

SMS Seydlitz: LD 1911, commissioned 1913.
Armor: 12in main belt, tapering down to 3.9 in bow/stern.

Kongou/HMS Indestructible: 1911-1913
8in main, down to 3in.

HMS Queen Mary: LD 1911, commissioned 1913
9in main, down to 4in.

So German ships had better armor, for sure.

Granted, don't quote me on the doctrines...I don't have a source on High Seas Fleet doctrine handy.

But yes, if anyone but the Brits had retained outright BCs, they would have been useful in the role the Fast BBs eventually played. Carrier escort duty? That would be a much more useful role.

By that logic, the King George V-class battleships would have been designated as battlecruisers by Britain. Which is hilariously wrong.

And having originally been a battlecruiser hull is irrelevant (logically speaking); ask Saratoga, Lexington, or Akagi. Ship conversions are a thing. But I get what you mean, T-65.

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Most certainly true. But yeah, it's really a Brit quirk, so far as I know.

 

[Lord K]

IIRC German BCs and BBs, especially those from the late 1900s, typically had thicker armor as something of a layover tradition from the beginning of the dreadnought race when German guns were often smaller, carried slightly less range or had less penetrative characteristics than those mounted on their British equivalents, and there were difficulties at first coming up with engines capable of powering ships as fast as the British's without making what the Germans saw as "unacceptable trade offs". Thus they armored their ships slightly better with the idea in mind in a fight with the British, they would have to close the range until they could get to a distance where their guns would be effective, and thus their ships would have to compensate by having increased armor just incase they took hits during the approach to their own effective firing range. By the mid 1910s though, German guns and machinery had generally reached close parity with the English, but they still retained a slight emphasis on armor over increased speed.

(This was also partly though, Tirpitz's decision to use 12 Inch guns on a lot of ships in the failed hopes of avoiding an escalation in ship armaments in the mid-late 1900s, coming back to haunt the Germans. Even as newer ships were given newer guns that could fire at longer ranges, in order for the fleet to work together in a battleline, many were designed with the idea in mind that they would be stuck sailing in line with and having to approach to the same distance as the 12 Inch armed ships so that everyone (from that time/period of design at least) could effectively fire).

 

[staplesdex2]

...So is there any International Standard for Ship classifications? I don't want to read pages of what amounts to be one nation's idea to what to call their ships while another nation has another idea to call theirs.

 

[SV5195R]

...So is there any International Standard for Ship classifications?

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Not really? Each country had its own standards as to what call what. And some classifications were rathr unorthodox, like the post-war Soviet one.

 

[Agelastus]

I honestly have no idea if battlecruisers were ever employed in the role they were specifically designed for. Granted, Germany's battlecruisers were seemingly employed in the same mistaken fashion, but only once AFAIK.

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Battlecruisers were designed for two main roles - overwhelming and hunting down enemy cruisers and battlefleet scouting (where they were supposed to bull through enemy cruiser screens.)

For the first role see the Battle of the Falkland Islands.

For the second role see every North Sea engagement where the Grand and High Seas Fleets were at Sea - there's a reason that the Germans called their battlecruiser force the 1st Scouting Group.

-------

And, as an aside, regardless of what the Japanese called them, the Kongous were never planned to be used as part of the battle-line - Japanese planning for the "Decisive Battle" had them deployed with the cruisers that were supposed to wear down the US battle-line via night attacks prior to the decisive engagement.

By that logic, the King George V-class battleships would have been designated as battlecruisers by Britain. Which is hilariously wrong.

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As I posted earlier in the thread, with extract from the appropriate Admiralty documents, some of the early design studies for HMS Vanguard called her a "Fully Armoured Battlecruiser". As has been noted, for the British a battlecruiser was ultimately a vessel with capital scale weaponry with a speed advantage of 4-6 knots over the battle-line. Although the only evidence I have is evidence of absence the terminology seems to have been dropped around 1940/1 when the KGVs (whose speed straddled the gap between the QEs and Nelsons and the battlecruisers) started coming into service.

 

[Skywalker_T-65]

...So is there any International Standard for Ship classifications? I don't want to read pages of what amounts to be one nation's idea to what to call their ships while another nation has another idea to call theirs.

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Unfortunately, no. It really does vary between nations.

As a general rule of thumb though, I will only refer to ships by the commonly accepted definition. So Hiei and sisters (and Indy) are BBs. Irresistible/Implacable and the other Brit BCs will be called as such. Same with Seydlitz and her German cousins/half-sisters.

EDIT: In other news, all this discussion has got me digging through my Uni library for books on WWI/II naval design and tactics.

Thanks guys.

 

[Gosu]

Because the one I found clearly shows an armor layout that is slanted outwards, all the way from the bottom to the top, like a V.

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Armor slant is measured top to bottom though. The upper edge of Hood's armor belt was further outboard than the lower edge, thus the belt was slanted inwards. Plunging fire would have less chance of penetrating a slanted belt, which is why many countries used them. All of them were slanted inwards, counted from top to bottom.

The picture of the cross section on the page you linked shows this on the Hood.

 

[Firefinder12-B]

To show how tough the German Battlecruisers were here a picture of Seydlite after Jutland.



It look like she took a shell to her forward gun magazine something that sunk the British ships.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

To show how tough the German Battlecruisers were here a picture of Seydlite after Jutland.



It look like she took a shell to her forward gun magazine something that sunk the British ships.

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British battleships and battlecruisers at Jutland used a more volatile "gunpowder"/explosive, which meant that it was easier to trigger catastrophic magazine explosions. Additionally, practices with the operation and securing of the magazines in combat were found to be badly flawed, which lead to the loss of a number of British battlecruisers.

Unfortunately, no. It really does vary between nations.

As a general rule of thumb though, I will only refer to ships by the commonly accepted definition. So Hiei and sisters (and Indy) are BBs. Irresistible/Implacable and the other Brit BCs will be called as such. Same with Seydlitz and her German cousins/half-sisters.

EDIT: In other news, all this discussion has got me digging through my Uni library for books on WWI/II naval design and tactics.

Thanks guys.

Click to shrink...

If your library has it, I would highly recommend looking at Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Without a doubt the best researched, reasoned, and comprehensive account of the battle to date (and, importantly, it clears up a LOT of misconceptions and outright fabrications about the battle, as well as revealing a lot about Japanese naval practice, doctrine, carrier operations, and its commanding officers).

 

[Gosu]

To show how tough the German Battlecruisers were here a picture of Seydlite after Jutland.



It look like she took a shell to her forward gun magazine something that sunk the British ships.

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No, the guns and much of the armor of the forward turret was removed outside the harbor. The drydock could only allow a ship in with up to 10.5 meters of draft, and there was so much water in the fore end of the ship that Seydlitz exceeded that. Therefore, she had to be lightened before she could enter drydock.

Seydlitz did suffer a partial powder deflagration in the aft turrets at Dogger Bank though, and was almost blown up. Experience of that helped the German Grosskreuzer (literally Large cruisers, the German designation for them) to survive at Jutland though. This sort of hit did kill the British battlecruisers at Jutland, but the better German powder storage saved Seydlitz -- just.

 

[Skywalker_T-65]

British battleships and battlecruisers at Jutland used a more volatile "gunpowder"/explosive, which meant that it was easier to trigger catastrophic magazine explosions. Additionally, practices with the operation and securing of the magazines in combat were found to be badly flawed, which lead to the loss of a number of British battlecruisers.


If your library has it, I would highly recommend looking at Shattered Sword: The Untold Story of the Battle of Midway. Without a doubt the best researched, reasoned, and comprehensive account of the battle to date (and, importantly, it clears up a LOT of misconceptions and outright fabrications about the battle, as well as revealing a lot about Japanese naval practice, doctrine, carrier operations, and its commanding officers).

Click to shrink...

Sadly, we don't have it. Hilariously though, one of the books I did find has a check out card from the freakin 80s in it.

In other news (mostly here for anyone, BTW, not making any assumptions on what you know), the reason the Germans had better handling for their powder than the Brits at Jutland? SMS Seydlitz. More specifically, she was hit at Dogger Bank and a flash fire burned through and ruined both her stern turrets. The only reason she didn't go the way of the Brits at Jutland was because her XO was quick thinking and had the mags flooded. But because she survived that, the Germans now had the knowledge to be very careful with their powder and magazines.

Lessons learned from Seydlitz, made the HSF more prepared for flash fires.

Suffice to say, there is a reason that Seydlitz is our most important German girl, and arguably the secondary protagonist. Her refusal to sink at Jutland. Her earlier experience, including becoming what basically amounts to a savior for the German BCs, since her near-death highlighted what needed to be fixed in ammunition handling.

Also. If we're going to show how that girl refused to sink, this:

Spoiler: Seydlitz post-Jutland

Works better. And a bonus...color Seydlitz!

Spoiler: Color Seydlitz

IMO, she's a beauty in that 'early dreadnought' style. Second favorite ship with good reason.


Now, in more directly story related news: Should have the first of that new omake series tonight, hopefully. Frankly, if I were so inclined, I could probably make an entire spin-off story with Seydlitz as the main protag, but also a sort of 'snapshots' of the rest of the world too. Indy-Verse, what I've built anyway and not even really talking the alt!history bits, has a lot of room to expand. With the way I'm handling Abyssals, and the way characters have developed...

There's a lot that could be done. Which is why I'll also say this: Sasa is the only one so far, but I'm perfectly fine with omakes if you end up with an idea.

 

[Firefinder12-B]

The funny thing is when you look at the US powder handling at the time they already had it down that powder can and will sink a ship. You know why?

We lost more then our far share of pre iron hull ships and iron hull ships cause of bad powder handling. Look up what happened to the USS New Ironsides a stoves fall over and started a small fire. It soon went into a powder room then Boom. Then there was what happened to the Maine...

The US also recognize the fact that plunging fire was going to be a problem early on. So the Standards had thicker decks then the norm when they were built plus having the powder rooms below the shell rooms. A practice that didn't become the norm for everyone else until after Jutland.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

Sadly, we don't have it. Hilariously though, one of the books I did find has a check out card from the freakin 80s in it.

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Well, I'd highly recommend buying an E-book version of it, and again, Google Books has a good preview of it (Link: Shattered Sword).

 

[Selonianth]

I'm sorry I don't have the book that quote is directly from available but since it's referenced I'm going to go with it.

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Except that doesn't work, due to previously mentioned King George.

On top of that 24 kts is fucking pathetic by the time WWII rolls around. By that logic Everything after Colorado wasn't a battleship at all, but a battlecruiser.

You go right on ahead and tell New Jersey she's not a battleship. Go ahead, I'll wait at the hospital for ya.

Unfortunately, no. It really does vary between nations.

As a general rule of thumb though, I will only refer to ships by the commonly accepted definition. So Hiei and sisters (and Indy) are BBs. Irresistible/Implacable and the other Brit BCs will be called as such. Same with Seydlitz and her German cousins/half-sisters.

EDIT: In other news, all this discussion has got me digging through my Uni library for books on WWI/II naval design and tactics.

Thanks guys.

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... Now if only you could make it so that Indy actually consistently refers to herself as a battleship that'd be great...

 

[Skywalker_T-65]

As I said, if she called herself a BC it was a typo.

She will only ever call herself a BB, barring official RN business.

 

[Selonianth]

As I said, if she called herself a BC it was a typo.

She will only ever call herself a BB, barring official RN business.

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Then yea, you have a few typos in that last one, unless they already got fixed. *checks* Yep. Here.

She could let loose, once in a while. And if anyone was the best big sister, it was her. The entire British battlecruiser force- well, aside from the girls older than her -could agree! Besides, as Fubuki clambered onto her shoulders, being careful to avoid pulling on the straps of her borrowed 'bikini', Indestructible could find fun in the game herself. A test of strength and skill. She was a battlecruiser, it was almost impossible to lose. With that in mind, she moved forward, as a hesitant Shigure held onto her sister.

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She suddenly calls herself a Battlecruiser. I'm sure there was another but you might've gotten that one already.

 

[Fallenworldful]

...So is there any International Standard for Ship classifications? I don't want to read pages of what amounts to be one nation's idea to what to call their ships while another nation has another idea to call theirs.

Click to shrink...

I mean, if you really want to hammer out a rough, general guide that will still get proven wrong for the various exceptions, you can start with cruisers as they're the group with the closest thing to a definition you can get:

You have the protected cruiser, the armored cruiser, and derivatives of the armored cruiser, light cruisers and heavy cruisers. Protected cruisers had a thin waterline deck to keep their vitals safe from shell fragments and not much else. Armored cruisers combined that with a layer of belt armor to exclude weaker shells/fuse larger ones to provide an extra layer of protection, much like all predreadnoughts and most early dreadnoughts. Armored cruisers were intended to be able to serve in a battleline when they were first developed, but that role disappeared as ships went uniform main battery. By WWII both of these types were pretty much extinct and no longer in service besides a few auxiliaries in Italy and Japan.

Light cruisers and heavy cruisers came about from armored cruisers. They adopted the belt and deck configuration of the armored cruisers but mixed this with a larger number of smaller main guns instead of the fewer large caliber guns most armored cruisers carried. The distinction between light and heavy cruiser is completely arbitrary and laid out in the Washington and London treaties: basically, a heavy cruiser is any cruiser mounting guns larger than 155mm topping out at 203mm, while a light cruiser is any ship that mounts guns 155mm or smaller.

Of course, this has exceptions. The german Panzerschiffe Deutschland-class carried 11" guns on armor lighter than contemporary light cruisers from the US, for instance, which means they don't really fit in the classification scheme despite serving a similar role to cruisers. The Mogami-class was designed as a heavy cruiser but fitted with light cruiser armament to squeeze through the treaty.

The issue is further complicated by some of the destroyers that served in WWII. Germany built a series of destroyers with 150mm main guns, which is significantly larger than the 140mm main guns used on many Japanese light cruisers. France's Le Fantasque-class was heavier than Japanese light cruiser Yubari and mounted 138mm guns to Yuubari's 140mms. THat led to the allies calling the Le Fantasques light cruisers on more than one occasion despite them being destroyers and lacking belt armor.

And that's not even stepping into the mess that is the battlecruiser.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

Sadly, we don't have it. Hilariously though, one of the books I did find has a check out card from the freakin 80s in it.

Click to shrink...

Well, I'd highly recommend buying an E-book version of it, and again, Google Books has a good preview of it (Link: Shattered Sword).

I mean, if you really want to hammer out a rough, general guide that will still get proven wrong for the various exceptions, you can start with cruisers as they're the group with the closest thing to a definition you can get:

You have the protected cruiser, the armored cruiser, and derivatives of the armored cruiser, light cruisers and heavy cruisers. Protected cruisers had a thin waterline deck to keep their vitals safe from shell fragments and not much else. Armored cruisers combined that with a layer of belt armor to exclude weaker shells/fuse larger ones to provide an extra layer of protection, much like all predreadnoughts and most early dreadnoughts. Armored cruisers were intended to be able to serve in a battleline when they were first developed, but that role disappeared as ships went uniform main battery. By WWII both of these types were pretty much extinct and no longer in service besides a few auxiliaries in Italy and Japan.

Light cruisers and heavy cruisers came about from armored cruisers. They adopted the belt and deck configuration of the armored cruisers but mixed this with a larger number of smaller main guns instead of the fewer large caliber guns most armored cruisers carried. The distinction between light and heavy cruiser is completely arbitrary and laid out in the Washington and London treaties: basically, a heavy cruiser is any cruiser mounting guns larger than 155mm topping out at 203mm, while a light cruiser is any ship that mounts guns 155mm or smaller.

Of course, this has exceptions. The german Panzerschiffe Deutschland-class carried 11" guns on armor lighter than contemporary light cruisers from the US, for instance, which means they don't really fit in the classification scheme despite serving a similar role to cruisers. The Mogami-class was designed as a heavy cruiser but fitted with light cruiser armament to squeeze through the treaty.

The issue is further complicated by some of the destroyers that served in WWII. Germany built a series of destroyers with 150mm main guns, which is significantly larger than the 140mm main guns used on many Japanese light cruisers. France's Le Fantasque-class was heavier than Japanese light cruiser Yubari and mounted 138mm guns to Yuubari's 140mms. THat led to the allies calling the Le Fantasques light cruisers on more than one occasion despite them being destroyers and lacking belt armor.

And that's not even stepping into the mess that is the battlecruiser.

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Huh. I was under the impression that, especially as the Axis powers (or what would become them) began rather flagrantly disregarding the treaties (or making blatant lies about the ships they were building), the differentiation between light cruisers and heavy cruisers became more of a matter of displacement and guns.

 

[Starfield]

I mean, if you really want to hammer out a rough, general guide that will still get proven wrong for the various exceptions, you can start with cruisers as they're the group with the closest thing to a definition you can get:

You have the protected cruiser, the armored cruiser, and derivatives of the armored cruiser, light cruisers and heavy cruisers. Protected cruisers had a thin waterline deck to keep their vitals safe from shell fragments and not much else. Armored cruisers combined that with a layer of belt armor to exclude weaker shells/fuse larger ones to provide an extra layer of protection, much like all predreadnoughts and most early dreadnoughts. Armored cruisers were intended to be able to serve in a battleline when they were first developed, but that role disappeared as ships went uniform main battery. By WWII both of these types were pretty much extinct and no longer in service besides a few auxiliaries in Italy and Japan.

Light cruisers and heavy cruisers came about from armored cruisers. They adopted the belt and deck configuration of the armored cruisers but mixed this with a larger number of smaller main guns instead of the fewer large caliber guns most armored cruisers carried. The distinction between light and heavy cruiser is completely arbitrary and laid out in the Washington and London treaties: basically, a heavy cruiser is any cruiser mounting guns larger than 155mm topping out at 203mm, while a light cruiser is any ship that mounts guns 155mm or smaller.

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Source? Wikipedia claims the opposite.
Armored Cruiser -> Battlcruiser
Protected Cruiser -> Light Cruiser -> Heavy Cruiser

Battlecruiser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The first battlecruisers were designed in the United Kingdom in the first decade of the century, as a development of the armoured cruiser, at the same time as the dreadnought succeeded the pre-dreadnought battleship.

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Armored cruiser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In 1908 the armored cruiser was supplanted by the battlecruiser which, with armament equivalent to that of a dreadnought battleship and steam turbine engines, was faster and more powerful than armored cruisers.

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Protected cruiser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Protected cruisers were replaced by "light armoured cruisers" with a side armoured belt and armoured decks instead of the single deck, later developed into heavy cruisers.

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Heavy cruiser - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The heavy cruiser can be seen as a lineage of ship design from 1915 until 1945, although the term 'heavy cruiser' only came into formal use in 1930. The heavy cruiser's immediate precursors were the light cruiser designs of the 1900s and 1910s, rather than the armoured cruisers of before 1905.

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[Fallenworldful]

Source? Wikipedia claims the opposite.
Armored Cruiser -> Battlcruiser
Protected Cruiser -> Light Cruiser -> Heavy Cruiser

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Not exactly. The protected cruiser was replaced in its role as a fleet scout/light combatant/commerce raider by the light and heavy cruisers but their design was derived from the armored cruiser. Note that even the wikipedia article on protected cruisers calls the successors "light armored cruisers" and not "Light protected cruisers". The "protected" term refers to ships that only have a single armor deck, and "armored" is used to refer to anything with belt protection.

See, this is one of the reasons classifying ships is a fool's errand, there's too many ways to do it. You can classify based on evolution of design, on role, or just characteristics, and the first two often vary from nation to nation.

Example:
Armored cruisers in Japan, the US, and Russia were used as battle line combatants, while the very concept of the battlecruiser as the British envisioned it was to avoid confrontations with heavier ships which doesn't follow the same doctrine that Japan pursued with its armored cruisers.

Huh. I was under the impression that, especially as the Axis powers (or what would become them) began rather flagrantly disregarding the treaties (or making blatant lies about the ships they were building), the differentiation between light cruisers and heavy cruisers became more of a matter of displacement and guns.

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Cruisers in general were limited to 10k tons of displacement and there was so much cheating on limits that the displacement modifier was useless in practicality. Compare the Takao-class , the Admiral Hipper-class, and the approximate US heavy cruiser counterpart, USS Wichita, and compare Mogami with the rough US light cruiser counterpart, the St. Louis-class.

(displacement listed in US ton aka Short ton)
Takao:
10,850 stated standard displacement
17,350 full load displacement
35kt top speed
5x2 203mm/50 main battery
5"-1.5" belt
1.5" deck
4x4 24" torpedo tubes

Admiral Hipper:
17,820 stated standard displacement
20,384 full load displacement
32kt top speed
4x2 203mm/60 main battery
3.1"-2.8" belt
1.97"-.78" deck
4x3 21" torpedo tubes

Wichita:
10,760 stated standard displacement
13,224 full load displacement
33kt top speed
3x3 8"/55 main battery
6.4" belt
2.25" deck

=====

Mogami:
8,500 stated standard displacement
13,670 full load displacement
35.5 kt top speed
5x3 155mm/60 main battery ------> 5x2 203mm/50 main battery
4.9"-3.9" belt
2.4"-1.4" deck
4x3 24" torpedo tubes

Brooklyn:
11,000 stated standard displacement
13,671 full load displacement
32.5 kt top speed
5x3 6"/47 main battery
5.625" belt
2" deck

As you can see, Admiral hipper actually has the lightest main battery of all the heavy cruisers but is also the heaviest (a result of the cheating that Japan and Germany undertook during the treaty period).

Brooklyn masses the same as Mogami but was always intended to be a light cruiser, unlike Mogami which was cheated into a heavy cruiser by designing her 155mm triple turrets around the existing 203mm mount.

In summary, the massive disparity in displacements among ships of a given type mean that it isn't a very good gauge of what type of ship it is.

 

[SaltyWaffles]

Not exactly. The protected cruiser was replaced in its role as a fleet scout/light combatant/commerce raider by the light and heavy cruisers but their design was derived from the armored cruiser. Note that even the wikipedia article on protected cruisers calls the successors "light armored cruisers" and not "Light protected cruisers". The "protected" term refers to ships that only have a single armor deck, and "armored" is used to refer to anything with belt protection.

See, this is one of the reasons classifying ships is a fool's errand, there's too many ways to do it. You can classify based on evolution of design, on role, or just characteristics, and the first two often vary from nation to nation.

Example:
Armored cruisers in Japan, the US, and Russia were used as battle line combatants, while the very concept of the battlecruiser as the British envisioned it was to avoid confrontations with heavier ships which doesn't follow the same doctrine that Japan pursued with its armored cruisers.


Cruisers in general were limited to 10k tons of displacement and there was so much cheating on limits that the displacement modifier was useless in practicality. Compare the Takao-class , the Admiral Hipper-class, and the approximate US heavy cruiser counterpart, USS Wichita, and compare Mogami with the rough US light cruiser counterpart, the St. Louis-class.

(displacement listed in US ton aka Short ton)
Takao:
10,850 stated standard displacement
17,350 full load displacement
35kt top speed
5x2 203mm/50 main battery
5"-1.5" belt
1.5" deck
4x4 24" torpedo tubes

Admiral Hipper:
17,820 stated standard displacement
20,384 full load displacement
32kt top speed
4x2 203mm/60 main battery
3.1"-2.8" belt
1.97"-.78" deck
4x3 21" torpedo tubes

Wichita:
10,760 stated standard displacement
13,224 full load displacement
33kt top speed
3x3 8"/55 main battery
6.4" belt
2.25" deck

=====

Mogami:
8,500 stated standard displacement
13,670 full load displacement
35.5 kt top speed
5x3 155mm/60 main battery ------> 5x2 203mm/50 main battery
4.9"-3.9" belt
2.4"-1.4" deck
4x3 24" torpedo tubes

Brooklyn:
11,000 stated standard displacement
13,671 full load displacement
32.5 kt top speed
5x3 6"/47 main battery
5.625" belt
2" deck

As you can see, Admiral hipper actually has the lightest main battery of all the heavy cruisers but is also the heaviest (a result of the cheating that Japan and Germany undertook during the treaty period).

Brooklyn masses the same as Mogami but was always intended to be a light cruiser, unlike Mogami which was cheated into a heavy cruiser by designing her 155mm triple turrets around the existing 203mm mount.

In summary, the massive disparity in displacements among ships of a given type mean that it isn't a very good gauge of what type of ship it is.

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...which is kind of why I said displacement and guns. I was going to include armor into that, but it felt kind of redundant for the purpose of differentiating cruisers.

EDIT: And I meant for the time period AFTER the treaties were done away with.

 

[Selonianth]

*got a quote notice... no quote* I take it a quote messup occurred?

 

[Skywalker_T-65]

Probably.

In unrelated news: Making progress on Seydlitz snip/omake/spin-off/whatever-the-hell-we're-calling-it. Post in here, or snip thread?

 

[SaltyWaffles]

Er...I guess post in snip thread first, and then we could decide...? Kind of hard to make a judgement call without seeing it.

*got a quote notice... no quote* I take it a quote messup occurred?

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Yeah, sorry about that. It had a mostly-empty draft saved that I failed to notice before I posted.

 

[Fallenworldful]

EDIT: And I meant for the time period AFTER the treaties were done away with.

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It's still not a good criteria. Admiral Hipper was already post treaty, since by that point London Naval Treaty had gone kaput, and compared to US the post-treaty US light cruiser the Worcester (which is only 200 tons lighter at full load: 20,160 short tons for the Worcester compared to 20,384 short tons for the Admiral Hipper) they're almost identical in size. And then you compare the Japanese post-treaty heavy cruisers Tone and Ibuki to Worcester and the two Japanese cruisers are significantly smaller than the US light cruiser. Not a particularly good comparison. Armor is even worse, since you have the bizarrely thin armor (well, not bizarre technically but compared to their gun caliber yes) on the German cruisers and the heavy armor on the US light cruisers.

Basically, the only way to gauge a cruiser is by gun caliber. That's the one thing that doesn't have exceptions without going into stuff like the Courageous-class "large light cruisers," which were not very light at all.

EDIT: Sorry if I come across as pushy, I don't mean for any of this to carry that tone >.>

Probably.

In unrelated news: Making progress on Seydlitz snip/omake/spin-off/whatever-the-hell-we're-calling-it. Post in here, or snip thread?

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like @SaltyWaffles said, it's kinda hard to tell without seeing it first.