Nine sloops a year offered a treaty-era escort alternative

The counterfactual imagines Britain building roughly nine 1,200-ton sloops each year from 1930 while keeping their official speed below 20 knots. The 1930 London Naval Treaty permitted such a programme, and Britain could present the ships as replacements for First World War Flower-class sloops. A common hull could be completed as an ordinary sloop, survey ship, or Admiralty yacht, which might make the expansion appear less threatening than a comparable destroyer programme. Commonwealth and imperial navies might copy the type, while the United States and other powers might respond or dismiss the vessels as ordinary British patrol craft. Britain could afford and crew the ships, leaving foreign reaction as the main uncertainty.