Interestingly enough it only had two tirple 15,5cm turrets, but these were both in super elevated positions firing over the main battery turrets. This was an excellent position and probably the two turrets offered the same coverage as the three and four 15,5cm mounts of previous versions. It came at a cost of very long and lightly protected ammunition trunks/barbettes coupled with a higher center of gravity which decreased stability – however the 38.9m beam more than compensated for this. The low amount of 15,5cm barrels were balanced by the addition of a pair of 12,7cm/40 mounts, back to the original design’s standard of 8 such weapons. These were nicely arranged in a row on both sided of the funnel, again offering excellent firing arcs. There might have been several alternatives to the secondary battery layout (various sources indicate different placements) but the depicted option seems to be the preferred one.
On paper A-140I looked tempting however it ignored the fact that it required two types of turrets manufactured and also weight efficiency of such a layout (displacement/gun) was rather low. Of course in return it offered better redundancy in case of one turret getting disabled.
It seems finally in August the NGS caved in to the conventional main battery layout so Fukuda got the permission to proceed and he came up with his own vision which bears the A-140F moniker – some sources suggest the F directly relates to his name. He still kept the armament at 8 guns to keep dimensions and displacement down and he also took over the superfiring centerline 15,5cm from A-140I, but also added his preferred wing mounts, at the expense of two 12,7cm/40 emplacements.
@猫眼看秋要不要我帮忙翻译一下tempting?