Edinburgh and Belfast's quadruple-turret design path

The Edinburgh subclass was delayed because the Royal Navy hoped to fit a still-unready quadruple 6-inch mounting to Edinburgh and Belfast. The hardware had reached active development, which makes its near-adoption a useful counterfactual. Three quadruple turrets could have retained a twelve-gun broadside while freeing space that later Crown Colony cruisers needed for 40 mm anti-aircraft weapons. Keeping four mountings would instead have produced a sixteen-gun cruiser whose appearance alone might have had a deterrent effect. The imagined prospect of Hans Langsdorff learning that sixteen British 6-inch guns were chasing Admiral Graf Spee illustrates that psychological effect. A parallel aside asks how British destroyers might have changed if the higher-angle 4.5-inch turret had been ready when the Tribal class was designed.