Tone	Chikuma

I've heard mixed reviews about these two. Some sources say they were the best cruisers the Japanese ever built. Others state that the follow-on Ibuki class, which was never built, would have been a copy of the Mogami, rather than the Tone, because of war lessons learned which rejected the concept of an all-forward armament layout (how they figured that out, I don't know. These ships weren't involved in very many gun actions.) Their main gun layout was sort of bizarre, with four dual turrets forward (some of which suffered from very poor firing arcs), and none aft. Their aft decks were totally devoted to AAA and float plane operations (they carried 5, as compared to the 3 carried by most other Japanese CAs), which made them very useful as scouting ships for carrier battlegroups, and consequently they spent much of the war hanging out with the carriers of Combined Fleet, rather than fighting in rat-holes like the Solomons. 'Course, sitting at anchor at Truk wasn't exactly a Carnival cruise, either.