By the 1890s, the Royal Navy possessed enough individual design ideas to contemplate an all-big-gun battleship. The counterfactual proposes that John Goodenough, had he lived to become First Sea Lord, might have supplied the institutional leadership needed to combine them. Such a ship probably would not have carried Dreadnought's exact weapons, but it might have mounted four or more principal-gun turrets. Contemporary papers even considered superfiring arrangements, showing that the concept's components existed well before 1905.
Notable Point · 1:27:19-1:28:58
Could the Royal Navy have built an all-big-gun ship in the 1890s?
A counterfactual about Admiral Fisher's mentor John Goodenough explores how leadership might have assembled an all-big-gun design before Dreadnought.