Criticism
This class is seen by naval architects as trying to fit a quart into a pint pot. The IJN's Naval staff insisted that each new class be superior to anything else in its category, this placed an enormous burden on Japanese naval constructors and the difficulties with these ships have to be seen in this light.
The initial construction was extremely light in order to comply with the naval treaties and had to be remedied. When the Royal Navy's Director of Naval Construction (DNC) was told about these ships, by British Naval Intelligence quoting the public displacement figure, he replied that the capabilities quoted could not be achieved on this displacement and that "they must be building their ships out of cardboard or lying".
Though the placement of Turret #3 improved its firing arc, and though the class had the stability problems fixed (the preceding Takao-class cruisers were considered too top-heavy), the Mogamis are generally not considered an improvement over the Takaos. Nonetheless, the follow-up Tone-class retained many aspects of the Mogami-class design. However, the Tones were intended for a different purpose with all of their main armament forward, so their stern could accommodate extra floatplanes.
Read more about this topic: Mogami Class Cruiser
Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“It is the will of God that we must have critics, and missionaries, and Congressmen, and humorists, and we must bear the burden. Meantime, I seem to have been drifting into criticism myself. But that is nothing. At the worst, criticism is nothing more than a crime, and I am not unused to that.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)