Talk:General Discussion/@comment-195.184.83.35-20140914121250/@comment-167.220.240.8-20140915083322

Historically speaking, the Mogamis should never be able to significantly outclass the Tone sisters, because the Tone-class was originally intended to be the 5th and 6th Mogami-class, but by the time they were laying them down some very significant deficiencies in Mogami's hull design were apparent - specifically several of the newer ships of the fleet were caught in a typhoon in 1935, and Mogami (among several other ships) suffered significant cracking from the stress of the heavy swell. They were also extremely unstable due to being too top-heavy (a common issue with Japanese warships) and they were built using an experimental welding technique rather than riveted together, and had significant problems with those welds cracking when they fired the main guns.

The Tone class took the Mogami's basic design and shifted all the guns forward so they could have more seaplanes at the back. They also fixed up most of the construction problems the Mogami-class had. They lowered the center of gravity and in Chikuma's case they did away with welds entirely, using rivets instead.