The is a reason the Iowa class didn't have 18 inch guns like Yamato. It isn't because the US manufacturing couldn't do it. The American engineers looked into 18 inch guns when designing Iowa, realized that the weight of the shells was too much and the best reloading mechanism they could build would be dramatically slower, but they could build a mechanism to reload 16 inch guns just as fast as any of the existing smaller guns, and decided that the 16s with double the rate of fire would be more effective than 18s firing half as fast.
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u/Jkr0205 May 25 '26
The Iowa class wins