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In WWI, yes - but by 1918, the RN's 'Greenboy' shells were some of the best ones going, and RN shells were pretty good after that. The USN's WWII superheavy shells offered more armour penetration in theory; the RN considered the same idea and rejected it. They have quite a few issues - the...

I'll grant that industrial action made things worse, and the new machinery was a godsend - but what did her in was the hull. The RN doesn't like to talk it up, but by the time she finally went you could put your foot through the deck in some places.

That's more or less how you'd have to do it. Not ideal, but it would work. Up to you whether you think of them as a slow G3 or an underarmed N3. Incidentally, they were design O3 of that sequence; a pair of fast battleship/battlecruiser designs - F2 and F3 - were produced to the 35,000 ton...

The NELSON class had triple turrets, which weren't entirely a success due largely to learning the wrong lessons from WWI and being overzealous with Treaty weight reductions. Several classes of cruisers had triple turrets as well, which were largely successful. For that matter, ISTR that the...

Not at all; DNC was asked to look into a triple turret on the 1914 REVENGE class in Y position. It was felt that there was no point having only one such mount so it wasn't done - nobody had a problem with the concept of the triple turret. The gunners probably moaned that it made firing...

I think it's a bit optimistic to call the three assault ships 'carriers', even if they are the same size as the INVINCIBLEs. But building them in France was a quid pro quo for their (and the Italians) Horizon class being built in British yards. The way I see it, twenty-two destroyers are well...

Let's be honest, guys, converting the ILLUSTRIOUS to British standards took so long and cost so much that she almost missed the war and cost us the third INVINCIBLE. She was completely worn out when the Americans decomissioned her, actually older than the ARK ROYAL and in worse material state...

The radars the British used required two scopes (one may have been for elevation, but I'm not sure), so the hood wouldn't work. The AI.20 and AI.23 for single-seat fighters were considered a limited fit. You could design a better 'coal hole', but at the date of the design something like it is...

Nope, that won't cause concern in Britain at all. Not one little bit. The Jeune Ecole originated in the French Navy recognising that it couldn't compete with the Royal Navy in a fleet action. To be honest, Germany can have a fleet of dreadnought battleships without threatening Britain - it's in...

10,000 tonnes of fertiliser and fuel oil (coal dust works too, apparently) would work almost as well. Escape was always tricky with fireships, best way might be a skeleton crew provided with a fast motor launch to get them clear and rendezvous with a submarine.

Take the Sea Vixen as an F3D equivalent, and the Scimitar as an F3H equivalent. Compare the latter pair of aircraft, look at what the F3H evolved into, and tell me that the Scimitar didn't have the same potential. If, of course, Vickers and the Naval and Air Staffs had any vision whatsoever...

Russian fleet planning was on the basis of 22 battleships and 12 battlecruisers in the Baltic, and a 50% superiority over the Ottomans in the Black Sea. Intentions for the Pacific Fleet I'm not so sure on, but can probably be inferred from the need to oppose the Japanese fleet. If WWI doesn't...

The Project GUK ships - twelve 16" guns on 38,000 tons, eight ships to be laid down in 1915 with guns made by Vickers - would doubtless put the wind up the Royal Navy. Extensive speculation elsewhere based on RN thinking is that the British 1915 programme is likely to see super-REVENGE class...

I once played around with something not entirely serious along these lines. I had the British realise it was getting ridiculous when they were trying to fit a 7.5-inch naval gun to a tank....

The way to go about it, IMHO, is to have the DH.110 go ahead in 1948 when it won the relevant competitions, rather than in 1953 - it spent a lot of time as a low-priority project being developed with company funds. That gives it a similar timescale to the Gloster Javelin - not coincidentally...

The second scenario is more or less OTL - as soon as the Grand Fleet showed up, the Germans started trying to get away. So let's go with the first scenario. Jellicoe is delayed somehow - let's say a submarine scare, they don't go home but spend an hour milling fruitlessly around the North Sea...

The way to go about it is to start with the proto-County that had a deep magazine for Sea Slug - arguably a better system anyway. That would give you the large spaces aft into which the Mk 10 revolver magazines could be worked. That's more or less what I'd go for, yes. I actually suspect that...

It would depend on hull depth, but I suspect not - the BELKNAP had her Mk 10 forward, and even the TRUXTUN had hers further forward. That extra eight feet of draught may also correspond to greater hull depth, it's hard to be sure. Certainly the internals of the COUNTY class don't look promising...

Good rule of thumb here: an 18-knot motor ship is faster than an oil-fired 20-knotter, which is in turn faster than a coal-fired 22-knot steamship. I believe a lot of it was due to anti-torpedo blisters adding significant amounts of resistance.

A sufficiently super-heavy tank could happily carry its' own anti-aircraft missile system. Not that that makes it any more practical.