The R class needed a trade-off

What if the Queen Elizabeth class had been much faster and carried triple turrets?

The mass R-class ships would have to preserve either speed or broadside weight, while a fast 12-gun Queen Elizabeth would radically alter the capital-ship balance.

The R class was intended as the volume force and could not credibly surpass the premium Queen Elizabeth design in both speed and firepower. If the Queens carried four triple turrets and made 28 knots, Britain would either preserve a twelve-gun broadside in a slower R class or retain the speed while cutting the cheaper ship to three triples. A 28-knot, twelve-gun Queen Elizabeth could catch much of the German battlecruiser force and still trade blows with contemporary dreadnoughts. It would pressure Germany to field triple turrets and unsettle American designs built around a gun-count advantage. This would create another Dreadnought-scale break in the baseline, showing how one premium class could reshape foreign programmes and its own cheaper follow-on.