From protected cruisers to the heavy-cruiser limit

The first Town-class batches are technically protected cruisers because they lack belt armour, yet they sit at the beginning of the Royal Navy's light-cruiser development. The design line continues through the Hawkins class, whose characteristics helped shape treaty limits for non-capital ships and the later heavy-cruiser definition. That makes HMS Bristol an unexpectedly early ancestor of the heavy cruisers that fought in the Second World War. Supposed revolutions in naval design usually have transitional predecessors, as the comparison with HMS Dreadnought also suggests.