Many sunken ships would lie in water shallow enough for survey, salvage, and eventual scrapping. Engineers could compare damage across British and German hulls, identify which armor and structural choices worked, and feed those observations into the generation after the emergency replacement ships. No other navy would possess a comparable collection of wreck evidence. The human cost would be appalling, while the technical evidence accelerated qualitative change in Royal Navy design.
Notable Point · 1:59:26-2:02:42
The Channel wrecks become a design laboratory
Shallow-water wreck recovery gives British designers an unprecedented body of evidence about how both British and German capital ships failed under fire.