Building large cruisers would use some of the yards and infrastructure Germany needed for battleships. British Parsons machinery illustrates how reliance on a foreign supplier could make spares harder to obtain in wartime. Shortages of parts may have made some German capital ships harder to keep at sea late in the First World War. Reverse engineering was possible, but it required engineers with the right experience who would have to leave other work.
Notable Point · 59:39-1:00:43
German yard capacity and Parsons turbine spares
German cruiser orders would compete with capital-ship construction, and turbine spares illustrate an industrial limit that new orders alone could not remove.