Board Thread:Event Community Discussion/@comment-28069733-20170514083426/@comment-26574811-20170514113841

IMide wrote:

And those were still cruisers. Battlecruisers and light cruisers both came from armoured cruisers (with CCs focusing on damage and CLs focusing on becoming smaller and lighter), and heavy cruisers came into being as an intermediate of both. DE as a ship category was phased out in 1975, but by then the term "Ocean Escort" had already been in use for decades. And yes, I still cannot agree with you on DEs being a destroyer variant. I've read the conversation earlier and nothing tells me that DEs are variants of DDs, like DDEs are. As the classification expanded, some ship classes started to become their own thing. Cruiser Voler is just the most prominent example by far.

I can easily agree with you that a destroyer variant without a torp is a no go for the IJN. The point of contention is whether the DE is one to begin with. No, CL came from PROTECTED cruisers, BC came from ARMORED cruisers. By the magic of translation these are easily confused, but they are very different.

The "tech tree" looks like this:

Protected C. -> CL -> CA (CA was derived from CL, only after Washington Treaty that CA was defined into a different category)

Armored C. - > BC(CC) -> some very unique ship classes like Alaska and Deutchland.