Lord Nelson's displacement prompts a counterfactual treaty rule that would allow old sovereign-style battleships to be replaced within roughly a 15,000-ton limit. Britain, the United States, or Japan might then have produced their own answers to the German Deutschland-class concept. The comparison extends the ships' Edwardian design story into interwar naval treaty choices. It shows how tonnage rules can redirect naval architecture as well as limit it.
Notable Point · 9:37-10:55
A treaty-era replacement path for old battleships
A short counterfactual considers how a 15,000-ton replacement limit for surviving pre-dreadnoughts might have encouraged new coastal-defence or pocket-battleship designs.