Talk:Colorado/Gallery/@comment-24930367-20190525051640/@comment-66.188.55.201-20190525154812

The "clock" is something called a Range Clock. It used three hands, manually set by some poor enlisted man, to indicate to other ships in the formation the range to the target that they were engaging, in hundreds of yards. (One hand was for 100 yard increments, one for 1000 yards, and one for 10,000 yards.)  Along with deflection markings that were painted on the base of the turret to indicate the bearing they were aiming, these were meant to be used to help concentrate fire on specific targets by letting the rest of the formation ID who to shoot at. These were common in the 1920s (when the Colorados were commissioned), but deflection markings fell out of use in the 1930s, and range clocks were rarely actually used after that; the arrival of shipboard radar made them completely obsolete, hence why it's removed in her Kai form.