Technology transition and fleet resilience

Lord Nelson challenges the idea that a breakthrough instantly makes every earlier platform irrelevant. Dreadnoughts displaced the older sovereign-style battleships from the front rank, but did not erase their military usefulness. Building overlapping classes gave Britain a fallback while new gunnery, turbines, and battlecruiser concepts were proven. That insurance depended on the industrial capacity and supporting infrastructure to build several development paths at once, a luxury available only to a heavily investing naval power. The class then demonstrated its value in the war effort far from the North Sea.