The unbuilt quadruple-gun Super Town

Edinburgh and Belfast were designed to accommodate four-gun mountings, but the quadruple turret was not ready when construction had to proceed. The same mounting was considered for the planned Neptune class and possibly for the Crown Colonies. Wartime urgency instead kept proven triple turrets in production. Four quadruple turrets would have raised the theoretical ten-minute output above 1,250 shells, amounting to about 63.8 tons of high explosive. Although 6-inch shells penetrated less armour than 8-inch shells, repeated hits could wreck exposed fire-control equipment, radar, and other unarmoured systems, with some chance of a critical hit. The Crown Colonies followed the earlier Southampton pattern more closely than the enlarged Edinburgh subclass. Royal Navy design discussions repeatedly returned to volume-of-fire figures, though the chart shown in the video is a reconstruction rather than a located Admiralty graph. The suggestion that a quadruple-gun cruiser would have entered service if peace lasted into the early 1940s is explicitly counterfactual.