Could old dreadnoughts become battlecruisers?

Could old dreadnought battleships have been rebuilt as battlecruisers?

Only with great difficulty, because the conversion would require rebalancing the whole hull, machinery arrangement, and weight distribution.

A viewer asks whether old dreadnoughts could have been rebuilt into battlecruisers. Such a conversion would be extremely difficult because speed is not created by changing turrets or machinery alone. The entire ship's weight distribution and hull form would need to be rebalanced. The distinctive shapes of the G3 design and Hood show that fast capital ships were conceived around those requirements. A nominally economical conversion could approach the complexity of a new design.