User talk:112.199.225.8

As per the initial design of the guns, it was first put forward that the main armament would be fifteen 15.5 cm guns, in triple turrets. This size of gun was comparable with the Tone class (and earlier, the Mogami class) being initially rated as a "B" class cruiser. This was in June 14, 1933. This was later changed to four turrets of 3 guns apiece. This came in 1936 as the ships were already on the ways (in construction). The necessity of this change was the designation of the Tone class to be scouting cruisers for the main fleet. As such, they needed to house many more seaplanes than originally designed. Also, as the planes may need to be launched while the ship was under attack, the guns would have to be firing simultaneous as well. This led to the unheard of design of moving all main gun armament forward to allow for all air operations to be towards the stern. This gave the Tone class a singular appearance from all other cruisers, foreign or Japanese. With the failure of extending the earlier Washington Naval Treaty or making a new treaty, the Japanese allowed it to lapse so that in January 1937, the decision was to upgrade these cruisers to "A" class status as they both still had not been launched. All of this, and more, is listed in Lacroix and Wells, Japanese Cruisers of the Pacific War, Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, MD, 1997, pgs. 502-503.

One other thing that I saw in all 3 Wiki articles (Tone, Chikuma, Tone class cruisers) was that the length was listed as 189.1m. While this is correct for length (pp), it is not the length that is most commonly thought of when considering the length of a ship. I have several other sources that show that the overall length (length oa) was 201.6m [Lacroix and Wells; Watts & Gordon, The Imperial Japanese Navy; Goralski & Nowak, Japanese Heavy Cruiser Tone: Super Drawings in 3D; Goralski, Japanese Heavy Cruiser Chikuma: Super Drawings in 3D; even the 1/200 paper/cardstock models of Chikuma (GPM model at www.gpm.pl) and Tone (Dom Bumagi model at www.freetime.co.ua) have it listed as such]. These sources also list the length (WL) as 198.0m. IJN watcher (talk) 17:42, 9 January 2022 (UTC)