Gas turbines and a 50-knot Royal Navy gunboat

What if the Royal Navy had working gas turbines for its Second World War gunboats without affecting aircraft-engine development?

The result would be steam-gunboat-sized craft capable of roughly 40 to 50 knots.

A successful compact gas turbine could have produced gunboats about the size of the steam gunboats but capable of 40 to 50 knots. Holding aircraft development constant isolates the naval payoff of the technology. The counterfactual shows why power-to-weight ratio mattered so much for small, high-speed coastal forces.