Shipbucket

Hood
There are plenty of ships on ship bucket with 984 and 985 on. Most of them being carriers. 984 was never a small ship radar that is why the Counties never got it and it was never that reliable. I envisioned the 96A as a Flagship so the RADAR's would be the same as the CV's or better.

As for the STAAG and Sea Cat reason I put it on is that Sea Cat can't deal with Surface contacts. As the 3" was a dual weapon but primary AA I put on something that could take care of a MTB/MGB etc without draining the 3" magazines.
Thanks for the encouragement, much appreciated and means a lot.

As for reloading would be a whole lot happier with the 3" than having to manually load a Sea Cat with the Sea Slug likely to go off at any time.

Hood's point on the 3inchers bears some investigation. Hull form that far aft will be significantly more slender than the full 88' midships sections, the outer shafts are already at full run, and you're more or less over the glands of the inner shafts. This suggests a rapid narrowing below the waterline.

Added to that you are abreast the significant volume of the Sea Slug magazine. I spent a brief week on a decommissioned County at Whale Island, HMS Kent (you can guess the more ribald nick name for her). Although generally well proportioned ships all the main deck spaces from the main steam plant uptakes aft were severely compromised by having to be fitted around the huge missile tunnel. This void, which I recall as being at least a full deck hich, and some 30 or so foot across, completely dominated the interior of the vessel. At the aft end it actually widened appreciably to provide a handling space for the missiles to be prepared for flight in.

All of this leads me to suspect that any close in AA weapons mounted aft on a cruiser like this would have to have minimal below decks penetration, and that in fact your Staag mounts (or perhaps a single one), given the right shielding from the very severe blast of a sea slug launch, might well be more suitable here than the 3 inchers.

As I say, I'm not at all sure, but much of what Hood says rings true, and if we can help develop a more realistic representation of what is a very handsome vessel, we would be glad.

Sea Cat was able to engage suface targets, albeit in a limited fashion. As Hood already said, Sea Cat was a replacement for STAAG, which was not reliable, any way.
Placing the 3"/70 that far aft seems wrong somehow, and you can replace them with Sea Cat (from amidships) and place the 3"/70 amidships, where there is enough volume in the hull for the magazines. Sea Cat as was installed on HMS Blake and Tiger (and HMS Cavalier and Caprice for that matter) had a deckhouse for the reload missiles (an armoured one on the Blake and Tiger - armour being around 1" thick), and that means you realy don't need that much volume in the hull for it.

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Thank you Kim for the crest

"Never fear to try on something new. Remember that the Titanic was built by professionals, and the Ark by an amateur"

Novice
It's the albeit part, that I was referring too. I've tried to keep both Sea Cat and 40mm on target against a FAC and L/L Buccanneer and the 40mm was a whole lot easier to keep on target. All the Sea Cat engagements in 1982 were for aircraft not one on any of the surface targets that happened to be engaged.
The reason for the 3" that far aft was to have the greater firing arc presented. but as you can see I've rotated the 3" and Sea Cat around. personally I prefer the idea of the 3" aft with the Mag below the Sea Slug loading room and if you look at the original drawing it is only 15m (approx) further aft than that plan.

As she might have looked after a late 70's refit. Sea Dart and Sea Wolf replacing the older systems.
1022 and 967 radar to replace the 984/965 and 992. Still keeping the 2 pairs of 3" and 6" turrets.

Please go back and delete the attached uploads of some of the previous versions of this drawing. The webspace for attachments is very limited.

I agree regarding the infeasability of fitting 3/70 far aft.

with the Seadart and Seawolf positions it does look as though they are crowding each other, and I don't think that would be right in real life. I would be concerned about several issues: situating all your sam defence in one place (easy to loose to damage), having the Seawolf launchers damaged from Seadart launch, and also, having to re-engineer the Seadart from a vertical stowage into a horizontal one - that would be an excessive cost just to get it onboard an already old hull.

Some things still not fixed.

I think had GW96A been built by the late 1970s she would have been scrap. Cruisers by then are out, yes shore fire support is one role but how often have the RN really needed that capability given the far larger threat from Soviet SSNs, SSGNs, Backfire bombers, the entire Northern Fleet etc etc.
Adding Sea Dart isn't going to be feasible and really if the RN is spending this much on revamping an old cruiser built to 1950s concepts then really they should be spending that money on extra Type 42 destroyers or Type 22 frigates.

As a pure what-if though your original Sea Slug version with the 3in moved further forward does look rather good.

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Interwar RN Capital Ships
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What ?

Portsmouth Bill
Re the Sea Dart against Sea Wolf blast damage. The early Type 22's/Leander's had Exocet mounted very close to the forward Sea Wolf and suffered no effects.
The Dart loader could easily be modified to take the missile from a vertical stowage and load it out of the doors horizontal. After all it only requires some engineering work and you have a loading room that was designed to take 2 Sea Slug so plenty of space.

Hood
The whole of the design is a what if. So I think that as a feasibility study Sea Dart would have been possible to fit on board. Certainly not cheap but definately possible, after all a new build would be cheaper thana rebuild to this standard. Think of how many Sea Dart rounds would have fitted into a magazine that GW96A would have had. After all a Batch 2 County had 36 Sea Slug and that was with a lot of though given.
I suspect that you should be able to replace 1 Sea Slug with 3 maybe 4 Sea Dart.
You say by late 70's Cruisers would have been out. Personally I agree with you about the history. But the RN built the Type 82 almost 2/3rd's the size of GW96A to try and fit 2 types of missile ie Sea Dart and Ikara on the same hull. So if GW96A had been built would there have been a need to build the Type 82? Might take a look at the Ikara replacing the A turret see how that looks?
However, what is the Cadet training ship in portsmouth, it's a rebuilt HMS Bristol rather than a more cost effective/bigger accomodation RFA.