Four or more British battleships would make it less likely that every hull simply repeated the Nelson layout. An initial pair might retain that heavily armed design logic, while later ships respond to the faster battleships appearing abroad. The seven possible battlecruisers likewise divide naturally into batches of three and four rather than one unchanged class. Repeated orders allow the Royal Navy to build, evaluate, and improve instead of betting its entire interwar modernization on one design. The process also blurs treaty labels because a 42,000-ton, 15-inch-gun ship might be a fast battleship in function even when declared as a battlecruiser.
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British capital designs evolve by building batch
Multiple authorized hulls let Britain move from Nelson-style battleships toward faster designs and build two successive battlecruiser classes instead of freezing one emergency solution.