User blog comment:Erupi/Big Seven and the Origins/@comment-26091666-20150704065539

It has been awhile since I last revisited this blog entry. The information provided is somewhat useful however it doesn't necessarily highlight the basis of which intricate knowledge for the names of each of these ships from all participating countries. In other words it lacks citation where it is needed the most.

Needless to say; the former battlecruisers better known as Kongou-class later on as per cited on wikipedia - re-modelled into battleships, thus violated the restrictions imposed by the Washington Naval Treaty as quoted, "The reconstruction of the Kongō-class battlecruisers added an additional 4,000 tons of armor to the ships, directly violating the terms of the Washington Treaty."

Sure enough, these modifications were carried out right after the Washington Naval Treaty but it wasn't made clear enough in any of the aforementioned references. Hence the need to locate a reference that would simply outline all the ships named to be in the Big 7 group and not the first and second 8-8 groups which Japanese had.

After having discussed this in chat along with Qu33k the following references Qu33k provided are useful enough to indicate exactly who were the Big 7 as officially noted even though the Big 7 naming convention itself was a nickname:


 * http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/pre-war/1922/nav_lim.html
 * http://history.state.gov/milestones/1921-1936/naval-conference

Note that in this particular case I have only highlighted the names of HMIJN ships and not of the respective USS or HMS ships.