Germany's interwar naval development gap

A delayed European war into the 1950s would not automatically make Plan Z competitive. British, American, Japanese, and Italian naval development was moving faster, while Germany had little postwar design experience. The Deutschland class is treated as enlarged heavy cruisers, while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau are fast battleships whose 11-inch guns reflected what German industry could then provide. These ships remained close to modernized First World War thinking because Germany lacked an uninterrupted capital-ship design program. Rearmament was therefore a race in accumulated design practice and production infrastructure as well as planned hull numbers.