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Description
Even as the USS Worcester began her first rounds of sea trials, it became evident that the new class would not be the apex of naval anti-aircraft warfare. Her guns, although the largest truly dual-purpose weapons ever constructed up to that point, were markedly less effective than expected. Although not bad, and having significantly improved long-range performance over the Mark 12 5"/38 guns on the earlier Atlanta and Santa Barbara-class cruisers, the massive displacement of the ship (over 17,000 tons fully loaded) made Worcester a financial nightmare to operate and mass-produce. Something better was needed to justify the obscene cost.
Enter the 6"/47 Mark 21. Although identical barrel-wise to the older Mark 16 DP, the new triple mounting had an automatic all-angle loading system for the main battery- a loading system that halved the reloading speed from 5 to 2.5 second. The new ship was intended to serve as an AA cruiser, but had extremely potent antisurface qualities due largely to her obscene rate of fire and accuracy (the wide spacing of her turrets' barrels was thanks to the complex loading systems, but it had beneficial side effects). One unusual feature of this new ship was her lack of a dedicated secondary battery, a result of her direct lineage from Worcester. As the final ships of the preceding class were launched in the early days of 1949, the then-unnamed Anchorage had her keel laid and her guns assembled in near-total secrecy.
Commissioned in early 1951, Anchorage gave outstanding results even from the very beginning. Her mechanically complex guns had countless ways of failing, but after firing over a thousand rounds in testing with the only recorded issues being overheating and one gun failing to run out after it had fired its last round, the Navy accepted the ship for service. With her brand-new experimental high-performance radar sets and quad 20mm Radar-guided Airborne Target Engagement System (RATES in common navy parlance), Anchorage was by far the most advanced ship in the fleet when she joined it. Her eleven sisters were the bane of the IJN's carrier attack forces, not once being damaged by aircraft or missiles despite confirmed kills exceeding two hundred aircraft for the entire class. In surface warfare, the ships proved to be terrifying opponents, capable of smothering much larger opponents in shells and forcing them to retreat out of sheer terror- the IJN Takao learned this the hard way after taking nearly a hundred and fifty 6" rounds up and down the ship in the span of five minutes from the USS Tampa, and promptly withdrew after all her fire control systems were destroyed and her main battery turrets incapacitated. The damage was so severe that she sank later that day anyways. Postwar, all twelve ships survived well into the 1970s, when they were taken out of service. Six of them still survive, either in reserve fleets or as museums (Tampa and Anchorage, in their respective cities).

Description
Even as the USS Worcester began her first rounds of sea trials, it became evident that the new class would not be the apex of naval anti-aircraft warfare. Her guns, although the largest truly dual-purpose weapons ever constructed up to that point, were markedly less effective than expected. Although not bad, and having significantly improved long-range performance over the Mark 12 5"/38 guns on the earlier Atlanta and Santa Barbara-class cruisers, the massive displacement of the ship (over 17,000 tons fully loaded) made Worcester a financial nightmare to operate and mass-produce. Something better was needed to justify the obscene cost.
Enter the 6"/47 Mark 21. Although identical barrel-wise to the older Mark 16 DP, the new triple mounting had an automatic all-angle loading system for the main battery- a loading system that halved the reloading speed from 5 to 2.5 second. The new ship was intended to serve as an AA cruiser, but had extremely potent antisurface qualities due largely to her obscene rate of fire and accuracy (the wide spacing of her turrets' barrels was thanks to the complex loading systems, but it had beneficial side effects). One unusual feature of this new ship was her lack of a dedicated secondary battery, a result of her direct lineage from Worcester. As the final ships of the preceding class were launched in the early days of 1949, the then-unnamed Anchorage had her keel laid and her guns assembled in near-total secrecy.
Commissioned in early 1951, Anchorage gave outstanding results even from the very beginning. Her mechanically complex guns had countless ways of failing, but after firing over a thousand rounds in testing with the only recorded issues being overheating and one gun failing to run out after it had fired its last round, the Navy accepted the ship for service. With her brand-new experimental high-performance radar sets and quad 20mm Radar-guided Airborne Target Engagement System (RATES in common navy parlance), Anchorage was by far the most advanced ship in the fleet when she joined it. Her eleven sisters were the bane of the IJN's carrier attack forces, not once being damaged by aircraft or missiles despite confirmed kills exceeding two hundred aircraft for the entire class. In surface warfare, the ships proved to be terrifying opponents, capable of smothering much larger opponents in shells and forcing them to retreat out of sheer terror- the IJN Takao learned this the hard way after taking nearly a hundred and fifty 6" rounds up and down the ship in the span of five minutes from the USS Tampa, and promptly withdrew after all her fire control systems were destroyed and her main battery turrets incapacitated. The damage was so severe that she sank later that day anyways. Postwar, all twelve ships survived well into the 1970s, when they were taken out of service. Six of them still survive, either in reserve fleets or as museums (Tampa and Anchorage, in their respective cities).