Germany trades numbers for a few fast heavy ships

Germany could abandon an unwinnable numerical contest and move into the qualitative race with an L 20-style 16.5-inch design. German battlecruisers of about 27 knots would lose their speed advantage against projected 28-knot British and Italian battleships. A British ship combining that speed with Warspite-like protection and heavy guns would be particularly dangerous, and continued shell testing is expected to resolve British fuze problems by 1920 in this scenario. Answering those ships would require difficult choices among British turbines, oil-fired boilers, and experimental diesel or diesel-electric machinery. Army pressure on the naval budget could restrict construction to roughly two ships per generation and perhaps six additional capital ships by 1920. Britain might build about four times as many over the same broad period. The resulting German ships could be individually formidable while the fleet remained short of cruisers, true destroyers, submarines, and ocean-reconnaissance capacity.