Designing a treaty system for first-class and true heavy cruisers

The closing design exercise builds on the French classification system. It treats the 10,000-ton large light cruiser as the first-class baseline, retains a second-class light cruiser below it, and then defines a distinct true heavy cruiser. Because those heavier ships would be few in number, the problem combines individual-ship capability with treaty tonnage and force-structure limits. The treaty label should follow a coherent hierarchy of roles and restrictions rather than gun calibre alone. The prompt provides a framework for testing how alternative cruiser categories might have changed interwar fleets.