Board Thread:Event Community Discussion/@comment-25730832-20170511175819/@comment-26574811-20170513233705

Hyper Shinchan wrote: Vcharng wrote: So we never said that the Japanese subs have the same role as their American counterpart, did we? However, these DE supporters are saying that DE and Kaiboukan have the same role as their reason to support the DE classification, which is incorrect. Carriers, BBs and SSs are defined not by their role, so there's no such a problem. Ahem, how would you functionally distinguish between DE and PF in the USN? Even the torpedo tubes are more a legacy than a piece of equipment regularly used in their wartime activites; the short hulled DEs didn't have them to begin with, which would make them PFs if we use this secondary anti-ship capability as the discriminant factor, ultimately many long hulled DEs gave up their torpedo tubes as well when the AA threat became even more paramount than what it was before (EDIT: I said because of kamikaze before, but I was wrong, the first DEs to give up their torpedo tubes for more AA were those that served in the Med). I'm more inclined to distinguish distinguish between DE and PF mostly on genetic lines.

On the matter of DE supporters, in my opinion they, deliberately or accidentally, ignore the PF designation and its historical usage. I don't, I distinguish them by feature and by the fact that DEs are restricted by London Treaty and PFs are not (regardless whether the USN still take the treaty into consideration in 1942 or not, this is how they are defined under the treaty nonetheless)

Also the definition talks about how a ship is "designed" to have, so as long as DE was designed to be able to carry torps, they are DD varients regardless of those torps being removed or not later on. This applies to the 20-knot criteria as well, Evarts-class was designed to sail at 24kt, so even if some of them ended up going only 19kt, they are still restricted by the treaty.