Gunnery tables turned peacetime results into battle estimates

The rules began with Royal Navy firing practice from 1922 to 1926 and cut the recorded hit rate by 30 percent to approximate action conditions. Umpires then modified the result for target size, smoke, visibility, air spotting, and whether the firing ship was under return fire. Separate entries allowed different battleship types and gun arrangements to be compared within the same problem. The arbitrary reduction may have undervalued trained gunners, but it kept exercises from treating peacetime accuracy as a wartime guarantee. The resulting table modeled uncertainty and combat friction instead of predicting results from one headline percentage.