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Concept
Town-class cruiser (1936)
Summary
The Town class consisted of 10 light cruisers built for the Royal Navy during the 1930s. The Towns were designed to the constraints imposed by the London Naval Treaty of 1930. The ships were built in three distinct sub-classes, the Southampton, Gloucester and Edinburgh classes respectively, each sub-class adding on further weaponry.
Like their US and Japanese counterparts of that era, the Town-class cruisers were "light cruisers" in the strict terms of the London Treaty, which defined a "light cruiser" as one having a main armament no greater than 6.1 in (155 mm) calibre. All three major naval powers sought to circumvent the limitations on heavy cruiser numbers by building light cruisers that were equal in size and effective power to heavy cruisers. These ships made up for their smaller calibre guns by carrying larger numbers of them.
All ships of the class carried BL 6-inch Mk XXIII guns in triple turrets, with the centre gun mounted behind the two outer guns to prevent interference between the shells in flight and to give the gunners more room to work in. The turret roofs had cutouts at the front to allow extreme elevation, originally intended to give the guns an anti-aircraft capability. In practice the guns could not be trained or manually loaded quickly enough for continuous anti-aircraft fire, so the Royal Navy designed the Auto Barrage Unit (ABU) which allowed the guns to be loaded with time-fuzed shells and then fired when the target aircraft reached a set range. These ships were equipped with the HACS AA fire control system for the secondary armament and the Admiralty Fire Control Table for surface fire control of the main armament.
The secondary armament consisted of four twin Mk XIX 4-inch turrets, and two 2-pdr quad pom-poms. Additional light anti-aircraft weapons were added during the war and the 4-inch mounts were converted to Remote Power Control (RPC).
Official source
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