Requirements drift and the reality behind a tidy plan

The closing argument separates the ships from the institutions that specified and accepted them. Reichsmarine and later Kriegsmarine priorities kept shifting, so the class appears to have been ordered because some construction was better than none rather than because a settled light-cruiser concept existed. That weak ownership allowed attractive paper efficiencies to survive without enough operational challenge. Storing different ammunition types together simplified cooling and arrangement, but real ships needed separation because some stores were more failure-prone and could initiate larger explosions nearby. The verdict is institutional as much as technical: unstable requirements and eroded professional judgment produced a ship whose components promised more than the complete design delivered.