Why Hood's boat-deck fire cannot be judged from timing alone

How quickly could Hood's damage-control crews have responded to the boat-deck ammunition fire, and what would a surviving rebuild change?

The evidence is insufficient to judge the crew's response, while any later redesign would depend on the fire's actual path rather than simply removing the boats.

No surviving damage-control account explains when Hood's crew reached the boat-deck fire, what else they were fighting, or how the local command made its decisions. Reaching the fire also required men to work on an exposed deck during battle. The surviving evidence is too thin to justify criticism of the response speed. A reconstructed Hood would still need boats on deck and protection beneath them, but the exact redesign would depend on knowing how the historical fire spread. Missing testimony remains a real limit on technical judgment and should not be filled with confidence.