Why the cancelled Agincourt is difficult to reconstruct

The cancelled British Agincourt poses a problem because the stated technical difficulty sits awkwardly with its dockyard's experience building dreadnoughts and Queen Elizabeth. A straightforward repeat should have presented fewer difficulties than the cancellation explanation suggests. The missing design papers prevent a firm identification of what was different. The Queen Elizabeth design studies show the same problem: correspondence establishes that alternatives in the R1, R2 and R3 series existed, but the surviving complete ship's cover concerns the design actually built. Those study labels are separate from the later R-class battleships. Surviving references can establish that a proposal existed without preserving enough detail to reconstruct its arrangement.