To be fair, the Kongou class are only Battlecruisers before Kai. (when they have 3 slots). Kongou even introduces herself in the Kanmusu Codex as "The Super Dreadnought Kongou".
Kongou classes are ALWAYS battlecruisers, Hiei ended up being crippled by armor piercing shells from a heavy cruiser for instance and overall protection was worse then even the Alaska class in basically every way that mattered. The Japanese delusions in trying to pass them off as battleships notwithstanding.
Kongou and her sisters are Fast Battleships.
Battleships don't have vital compartments penetrated by cruiser shells and effectively zero immunity to any capital scale weapon used by the enemy. Even the 12 inch weapons on Alaska would have made mincemeat of a Kongou it had effectively no immune zone whatsoever against them. Needless to say 14 and 16 inch weapons laughed at their so called 'protection'. This is before we even get into the antiquated armor scheme with provided large zones of 'protection' whose only real value was to almost assure large caliber AP shells would fuse properly inside the ship...
Which are a European design philosophy that Japan and the US never really embraced.
Uh no, the US very much wanted speed, but it didn't want it at the expense of a reasonably balanced design and the treaties in force during the design of the late 30s classes made that balance nearly impossible to attain. Dozens of designs for the first US treaty battleships where batted about and a constant theme was that speed was desired, but not to the degree of weakly arming or protecting the ship compared to peers. Since the US and UK actually tried to abide by these treaties the result was that both of their classes ended up slightly slower in order to free up weight to make them reasonably balanced ships, the US slightly favoring firepower and the UK vessels protection while both settled for a similiar speed.
The Germans and Italy just fucking ignored the treaty and built ships thousands of tons overweight which allowed them to get both protection and increased speed. France went the most radical route adopting a very different layout to try and shave enough weight to attain both speed and reasonable protection. The Richelieu are certainly interesting ships and based on the Tone class ships performance I think they'd have worked reasonably well although not without there limitations. There where real trade offs made to compact the layout and gain those two or three knots over others actually trying to abide by the treaties.
Once the the treaties lapsed notice that the next class laid down by the US was a ship thousands of tons large, notably faster but with only marginally increased protection and firepower compared to the preceding vessels. Unfettered by treaties something much closer to Iowa is probably what would have been built to start with. The 27-28 knot speed accepted was a compromise forced by tonnage limits, the designers really wanted around 30 knots but just could not get it without giving up too much in weaponry and protection for their tastes.
Japan meanwhile had a different issue it's battleline was an absolute mess with nearly every ship having a different speed ranging from around 23-24 knots for the Fuso and Ise on a good day, to to perhaps 25 and change for the Nagatos after being rebuilt, to around 30 on the Kongou (after being re-engined). If the formation was to act together it would obviously be shackled to the slowest vessel, but if split up into different 'wings' it risked ending up like Betty at Jutland where the faster, but weaker portion ended up separated and smothered risking a defeat in detail. Thus a really fast ship would have been of dubious tactical use for them anyway, it would have been just ANOTHER speed to try and juggle. If it was fast it would either have to be deployed in a risky 'fast wing' or shackled to slower ships in probable battle conditions negating most of the advantage.
In that context giving the Yamato speed to comfortably operate with all the battleships, but not trying to push it much higher makes perfect sense.
This was also the threat the US was principally designing around by the 30s and so significantly influenced it's thinking in ship design. Intelligence during the NC design phase still had the Kongou pegged at their pre-rebuild speed of around 27 knots. So in that context the 27-28 knot North Carolina looked perfectly adequate as it could match the speed of any ship used by the most likely enemy while majorly outgunning those faster enemy vessels, so holding it down to that speed in order to gain good firepower and reasonable protection from the main threat weapon (14 inch Japanese guns) looked totally reasonable. In any case if others stuck to the treaty it was unlikely they would be able to get a ship THAT much faster that wasn't also be either worse protected or armed as well.
The problem of course turned out to be basically none of the enemy nations bothered to follow the treaty. Italy and Germany built ships over the limit that ended up both somewhat better armored, faster, and nearly as well armed and Japan built a ship that while no faster was ludicrously larger.
Japan never built any of their own Fast Battleship designs,
Every battlesihp Japan built was a fast battleship for it's day up until Yamato (debatably). The Fuso, Ise, and Nagato were all faster then contemporary designs by about 2 or 3 knots when built speed gained largely at the expense of protection (a issue that they made numerous suspect attempts to fix in later rebuilds). Tosa was supposed to be slightly faster still at about 26.5 which was again 2 to 3 knots faster then other battleships of the same period such as the South Dakota, N3, or Rodney shot for. Hell the first capitals ships they bought period were battlecruisers rather then battleships. Japan was actually quite obsessed with speed as seen for instance in the largely pointless attempts to make super fast 34-36 knot heavy cruisers, the extremely fast and extremely brittle dragons, Shimakaze, etc.
It was only with Yamato that a choice was made to hold down speed to maximize firepower and protection, and only when because it was clear they couldn't hope to compete in numbers with more conventional ships. Even so they still only settled for a speed of 'pretty fast', Yamato was still fast enough that she could have performed most missions including carrier escort... if she wasn't an ungoldy fuel hog due having such massive engines needed to attain her relatively high speed that it simply wasn't worth it or even possible to use to consistently in such roles.
And the only US Battleship class that could be called a fast battleship was the Iowa class.
This is still debatable really, what exactly constitutes a 'fast' battleship is a moving target 23-24 knots was fast in WWII, 25-26 was consider fast throughout the 20s and 30s, and 27-28 was faster still obviously. A few designs appearing just at the outbreak of war managed 30 knots thanks to major displacement increase but how much this set them apart from a ship that could attain 27 to 28 is debatable. In practice the slightly slower ships still proved able to serve as viable carrier escorts and in a surface action involving formations which by their nature are slower maneuvering it's fairly debatable if a 2 to 3 knot speed increase could be made to matter tactically.
As it was even in formations capable of nominally faster speeds, the formation speed was still often set at about 25 knots so everyone could easily keep pace and no one was overly taxing their engines and some reserve of power was left for emergency maneuvering. Its pretty ambiguous in game too Kaga struggled to make 28 knots, she might do it in ideal conditions but 27 and change was closer to her average, she still gets rated as 'fast' in game though.
Some Yakisoba brand are actually quite nice with soup, and vice versa with the soup one made into Yakisoba..
slrrrrrrrrpCHUG'bout time that I have some lunch too...
CHUGGING!?
Wait, what?!
CHUGThe Cup Yakisoba's Soup?They don't have soup - they have sauce.Peyong Sauce YAKISOBA
Peyang Sauce Yakisoba, made by Maruchan - here it's /peyango/ instead of /peyangu/