Where a German diesel-warship programme could go wrong

How might Germany overengineer the diesel-warship proposal into a failure?

The engine problem is considered manageable if Germany used its diesel-development capability. The greater risk is a successor ship whose design accumulates competing politically supported preferences.

The diesel engines themselves are considered a manageable part of the counterfactual programme. German effort spent on high-pressure steam machinery suggests enough development capacity to produce suitable diesels in the same period. Retaining the Scharnhorst design is treated as a workable approach. A successor design could instead accumulate competing ideas of perfection, each backed by political influence. Bismarck supplies the example used to criticise that process. The concern is about how the imagined programme might develop, without implying that a diesel Scharnhorst was built and failed.