County-class weight and the York-class compromise

The 1936 restriction on new cruisers above 8,000 tons before January 1943 is linked to the Crown Colony class. Earlier County-class cruisers expose a different problem: most exceeded their nominal 10,000-ton standard limit, with HMAS Australia at roughly 10,400 tons as the example. Even treaty-supporting navies therefore struggled to reconcile paper ceilings with actual ships. The alternate cruiser programme retains York and Exeter in its illustrative construction scheme, although both receive sharp criticism as design compromises that should have been avoided. That criticism concerns the ships supplied to their crews and does not diminish the crews themselves. A coherent tonnage allocation still leaves decisions about hull quality and which existing ships are worth retaining.