A hypothetical battery of twelve guns averaging eleven rounds per minute for fifteen minutes would fire 165 rounds per gun and 1,980 rounds for the ship. Against the roughly 200 to 250 rounds per gun quoted as a typical stock, that would consume a large share of the available ammunition. The multiplication is checked during the exchange after a mistaken intermediate figure. Even a modest increase above the listed sustained rate would therefore affect how long the ship could keep firing.
Notable Point · 6:18:11-6:20:19
How a Town-class cruiser could expend most of its ammunition
A hypothetical fifteen-minute burst at eleven rounds per minute would use 1,980 shells across a twelve-gun cruiser battery.