The explanation for Britain's 16-inch gun problems centers on a misleading inference from tests of German guns. A false positive encouraged a design philosophy that later testing undermined. British gun and armor metallurgy is judged superior in this assessment, so inferior British materials are rejected as the cause. British and American examinations after World War II are cited for serious German battleship-armor quality-control problems. The production problem was maintaining the quality of experimental work across the volume of armor required.
Notable Point · 1:13:09-1:15:14
German test pieces did not guarantee production quality
British gun philosophy could take a false lesson from German test results even though later Allied inspection judged British metallurgy and German armor consistency very differently.