My Shipyard

- Luso Class Cruiser -

# Ship Version

Through the many years of history, the Iberian Empire had one of the most fearsome navies of the world, conquering vast large areas of the globe and assuring their dominance of those with their mighty warships, but despite being famous for it and still remembered by those glory days, the Iberian Empire has fallen drastically. Their lack of resources and research made them unable to keep their warships up to date to face the most recent warships of the other nations, making their naval power decrease little by little as the nations progressed more and more. This problem only led to others, with people complaining about the lack of administrative skills of the emperor to keep the Iberian Empire great, protesting aggressively on the streets, forming rebellions, and even threatening of dethroning the emperor or claiming full independence. To contain such revolts, the navy decided to risk their few resources into developing a new class of cruisers that, though still outdated, should be enough to keep the Iberians in their places. The class was named Luso, and it had three warships belonging to it: Luso, responsible mostly for taking care of the revolts on the colonies the Iberian Empire still had; Hispano responsible for protecting convoys and preventing their crews from revolting; and Ibérica, responsible for taking care of revolts that occurred in the home islands of the Iberian Empire.

Due to the lack of decent technology and research on naval warfare, the most modern weapon that the Iberian Empire had was 14.5 cm guns, which were quite slow both to reload and turn around. The Luso cruiser had four twin mounts of them and to compensate for the date of the guns, they were arranged in an unusual way that allowed them to have elevations of almost 90 degrees up at the cost of not being able to fire at low angles, this way it could launch shells to penetrate vertically through the enemy armor and also fire over obstacles which are taller than most cruisers can usually fire over, like buildings and mountains... This proved to be very inefficient, however, increasing the time the shells had to hit the target, thus making it harder to hit moving targets, but the class proved to be quite capable when bombarding slow or stationary targets. Four single mounts of 11 cm guns were also installed to support the cruiser's main guns, but they proved to become efficiently worse the closer the enemy was. The best weapon it had was probably the four 533 mm triple torpedo launchers, installed two on each side, but even so, the torpedoes were quite slow and caused very reduced damaged when compared to a normal torpedo. The cruiser also had a few AA guns, but they were six single mounts of 7.7 mm guns only, proving to be nothing when facing enemy aircraft. The armor was also nothing of impressive since it was never intended to fight naval battles, rendering the cruiser vulnerable to almost anything that hits it, but it at least gave the cruiser the ability to easily dodge incoming attacks with speeds of 36.2 knots.

Luckily for the Iberian Empire, however, they managed to get closer to the Red Petals alliance and once its entrance was officialized, it received economic and technological help that allowed the Iberians to update some of their warships and build new ones with much better performance. In the case of the Luso cruisers, they had their guns replaced by the 15 cm dual-purpose guns of the Rome Empire, which proved to be much better for aiming, turning, and firing, but keeping the cruiser's peculiarities, those guns could aim at very high elevations without the cost of not aiming at lower elevations, not only allowing them to fire at fast-moving targets reliably well while still being able to penetrate enemy armor vertically and fire over obstacles that cruisers normally wouldn't, but also able to target enemy aircraft that are flying directly over the cruiser. The 11 cm guns were also replaced by 10.5 cm dual-purpose guns also given by the Rome Empire, while the torpedoes were replaced by four 610 mm twin torpedo launchers, equipped with the Katana torpedoes provided by the Sun Empire. Solely for AA purposes, the Romans 20 mm guns were also installed in twelve twin mounts, together with an extra pair of 7.7 mm AA guns, totalizing eight now. The armor of the warships was also redesigned, making it easier for shells to hit it in very unfavorable angles, but since the armor wasn't thickened, it was only effective against small-caliber guns of destroyers and, sometimes, cruisers. The engine remained the same despite the many changes, however, and since the equipment aboard was now more modern and heavier compared to its older counterparts, the class's speed was reduced to 35.6 knots at best. It was cogitated to replace one of the main guns for a seaplane catapult, but the Iberia Empire decided it would be better to let the cruiser as it is now and leave the aircraft capacity for other warships they build later. The results of such changes were highly satisfactory for the Iberian Navy, who started to envision a new role for their light cruiser, the one of hunting down destroyers, lightly-escorted convoys, and even other light cruisers.