Production runs were part of weapons development

Prewar British procurement assumed that the first ships and mountings in a series would expose faults under service conditions. Later units could incorporate corrections, and major refits could return those improvements to the early ships. That pattern helped mature successive twin- and triple-six-inch installations from Enterprise through the Town and Crown Colony classes. The postwar automatic guns entered service in only a handful of mountings, leaving too little equipment for the same iterative learning. Their reputation partly reflects the loss of that development base, while the underlying automatic-gun concept remained credible.