All-forward guns save weight but concentrate risk

Why did the Royal Navy take so long to return to an all-forward main-gun layout?

All-forward armament is a tonnage-saving compromise; when displacement is available, a balanced layout offers better magazine separation and damage resilience.

Concentrating every main turret forward is efficient when designers must maximize armament and protection under a hard displacement limit. The arrangement also concentrates magazines and makes the ship's fighting power more dependent on one part of the hull. A conventional fore-and-aft layout can divide ammunition into independent groups serving separated turrets. Flooding or explosion in one magazine area then need not silence the entire main battery, so the Royal Navy preferred a balanced layout when extra displacement made it affordable. A game that removes all main-gun ammunition after one magazine is lost misses the independence that separated magazines could provide.