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The problem is that battleship cannons in excess of 16"-18" caliber are incredibly inefficient. The ballistic range advantage of larger calibers ceases to be relevant because WWII-era fire control cannot see and aim any further, and the rate of fire declines exponentially with shell caliber --...

What the Latin American countries did was ridiculously short-sighted -- they decided that the shift from pre-dreadnoughts to dreadnoughts was their big chance to have naval power on par with the major European powers, because everyone was more or less starting over from scratch. This ignored the...

You're definitely conflating the various naval treaties. Japan didn't actually violate the Washington Naval Treaty at all -- it was France and Italy that did so. Japan felt they got the short end of the stick with the WNT ratio limit on capital ship construction, but they nonetheless honored...

The historical naval treaties weren't exactly written with any great expectation of trust between the power's, hence the elevator clause. Japan got away with it largely because the Western powers were unreasonably reluctant to believe that a "racially inferior" power could possibly build an...

The first nuclear-powered surface vessel was the Soviet icebreaker Lenin in 1959 , followed by the USS Long Beach in 1961 and the USS Enterprise later the same year. Fourth came the American fast cargo ship NS Savannah in 1962.

Exactly, and then the Nimitz took it further with two even more powerful reactors driving four shafts, two shafts per propulsion plant. Multiple shafts in a propulsion plant isn't super difficult, it's having multiple *reactors* in the same loop that gets into ugly amounts of complexity.

The eight reactor configuration on the Enterprise allowed for a one-for-one swap from conventional steam boilers, with a fully independent propulsion plant for each of the four propeller shafts and two reactors per plant. Rickover favored this for two reasons: it maximized reliability and...

The Congressional point of view was based on not knowing or caring about the advancing state of the art in naval warfare, yes. Congress didn't ultimately care that they were being "penny wise and pound foolish" because the cut-down, lower-tonnage battleship designs they kept forcing the Navy to...

Note that the battleship design series was named after him because he demanded that the Navy show Congress designs for "maximum battleships" in response to the slowly but steadily growing size of the battleships they were actually asking for. The Tillman designs were basically mocking the Navy.

The AK-130 system is a pretty formidable gun despite "only" being in the same caliber range as the 5"/54 Mark 45, as it delivers twice the rate of fire on a per-gun basis and stores 150-180 rounds on mounts as opposed to just twenty rounds.