Why fixed 4.5-inch ammunition suited cruisers better

A manually handled fixed round reached a practical upper limit at roughly 80 pounds, or 36 kilograms. A heavy fixed cartridge could deliver rapid fire, but it wore down gun crews and was difficult to sustain on a small vessel with little spare manpower or berthing. This helps explain why the same manually loaded weapon appeared on Scylla, Charybdis, Ark Royal, and auxiliaries rather than on smaller destroyers. A cruiser could rotate loaders between mounts, making the weapon more practical even when an individual gun crew could not maintain the theoretical firing rate.