The proposed ship was essentially an Edinburgh-subclass hull fitted with four quadruple six-inch turrets. Belfast and Edinburgh already had the turret-ring and ammunition-handling space needed for the larger mounting. The unresolved difficulty was the extra weight and gearing required to turn the complete turret. Delaying the ships for another six to twelve months might have solved that problem, but the approach of war led the Admiralty to accelerate them with triple mountings instead. The design shows how close the Royal Navy came to fielding a sixteen-gun cruiser rather than a purely speculative fantasy ship.
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The sixteen-gun Super Town cruiser
Belfast and Edinburgh were conceived around quadruple six-inch turrets that could have produced a sixteen-gun Super Town.