[SAMWolf]

Oh and since I know you're gonna ask:

When the war began, the cruiser "Salt Lake City" was already an old lady of a ship, two years from replacement date, and a rather disreputable old lady at that. She was at the bottom of the fleet in gunnery and ninth in engineering efficiency, had weak armor, a reputation for being a hazard to other ships because she steered so wildly and a crew that didn't seem to care whether school kept or not. But when the time came to put the heat on the Japs, she poured it all over them. She became known as "the one-ship fleet" because she conducted a personal feud with a Jap base and almost single-handed fought one of the decisive battles of the war. She killed more Japs and fought more actions than any other cruiser. This is the story of how the old lady turned into a tiger.

"Slick City", her crew used to call her, but she was the "Swayback Maru" to the rest of the fleet and before the war they used to laugh at her. There was reason to laugh. She was one of the first pair of cruisers built after the Washington Treaty, and a good deal of a comic compared with the sleek vessels that came later. When she was designed, American shipbuilders were faced with the problem of restricted tonnage, which they had never met before. They saved weight by cutting her armor belt down to a patch amidships and giving even that a thickness that would hardly have been adequate for a light cruiser; by omitting the upper deck to leave a long well amidships that gave her a swaybacked look; by placing her ten big guns three over two, fore and aft; and by cutting down on things inboard.

The results were that every time the "Salt Lake City" rolled, water went tearing through that well deck, the ventilation was never good and gunnery officers nearly went mad trying to synchronize the firing of two different types of turret. On top of that her steering gear behaved in the most unpredictable manner, and other ships hated to be in column behind her. The weakness of her protection did not show up until she began fighting, but the command knew about it and knew how inferior she was to the Japanese cruisers built at the same time---the famous "cheating cruisers" that were built by setting the 10,000 ton figure down on a piece of paper, then building a ship nearly half again as large.