Q&A ยท 5:54:52-5:57:07

Perfect British naval gunnery from 1939

The magical accuracy premise gives Renown a decisive advantage and prompts an argument about cumulative damage to armor.

Question

What if every British naval and anti-aircraft shell had perfect accuracy from 1939?

Short answer

The imagined accuracy would bring much heavier German and Italian naval losses; repeated hits on the same spot are expected to weaken armor that could resist an isolated shell.

Notes

Renown's encounter with Scharnhorst and Gneisenau becomes an immediate German disaster, while Norway and Mediterranean battles impose much heavier Axis losses. Repeated shells hitting the same point are expected to compound that advantage by progressively damaging the armor. Even a cruiser firing smaller shells becomes dangerous when every round concentrates damage on the same section of a battleship. This argument assumes the magical accuracy in the question and supplies no calculation of how many real hits would defeat a given armor plate.