Talk:Neptune-class cruiser

Neptune and Minotaur cruiser programmes really existed in rather different time scales in so far as they were seriously developed
I have been very interested in these late RN cruiser proposals all my life, but my assessment is that had they really ever been built they would have taken a rather different form and been built in an entirely different time period. During World War two the Royal Navy had essentially three types of cruiser, the small Dido and the intermediate Fiji- Swiftsure- Tiger, the reality of available resources and dockyards and workforce experience and tooling meant construciton had to be within pretty much established hull box sizes. Approval to build the third category of larger cruisers had become increasingly difficult to obtain with the Uk Treasury outraged by the cost of the Southhamptons' and there progressive escalation in size. Construction of large cruisers had pretty much stopped with HMS Edinburgh although the reconstruction of HMS Belfast and London meant work continued until 1943. The decision to built a final Battleship HMS Vanguard, instead of a 4 ship 18,000 ton of new Admiral class cruisers which could have reused the older County class 8 inch guns greatly reduced the resources potentially usable in large  cruiser construction or even more 5.25 guns cruisers. The N2 cruiser a new design in the same size box as the Swiftsure Tiger was the last cruiser design to be fully designed ready for construction with most components and fittings fully designed. Given the post war constricted finance available to the Royal Navy post war and the fact the ultimate versions of new auto 3 inch and 6 inch guns were not available for fitting before 1957/8 at the earliest construction of the Neptune class could only have actually occurred in 1944-47 and the Minotaurs in 1956-1963. In 1944 the expectation of the Royal Navy and Churchill was that war in the far east would continue to early 1947 with lend lease financing continuing to 1947 to allow a phased reduction in resources for naval construction. In 1953 both the proposed Minotaur and the 5000 ton cruiser destroyer were cancelled, the cruiser destroyer partly because there was not the finance or industrial resources to develop the planned automatic 5 inch guns. The high performance required for a DP weapon of that size was unrealistic, given the poor performance of the newly introduced US 5 inch 54. However similar designs were still developed by the RN in the form of the enlarged Daring. And several gun/ missile cruisers, rather similar to an updated Minotaur with X and Y turret replaced by one or two channel Seaslug systems and a slightly abbreviated forward gun armament, minus Q turret, of two twin Mk 26 6 inch and 2/4 twin 3 / 70. This project was cancelled in 1957 in favour of the Daring enlarged into the County missile destroyer very much a form of cruiser destroyer.