Why a 14-inch autoloader was a practical upper edge

Could interwar autoloaders have been extended from 14-inch guns to 15- or 16-inch weapons?

Possibly in theory, but shell handling, precision, machinery weight, and treaty displacement made larger systems much harder to realize.

A workable 14-inch autoloader could have raised battleship rate of fire, but larger shells magnified handling weight and precision problems. The mechanism also had to fit inside treaty-limited displacement without consuming the weight needed for protection, machinery, and other systems. Experience with smaller six- and eight-inch systems warned that scaling an autoloader was not a simple matter of enlarging every component. The passage frames the 14-inch concept as a plausible performance gain at the edge of what interwar weight control and mechanical precision could support.