The delayed director and long-range fire control

Queen Mary initially carried Pollen equipment and was selected for director installation, but Winston Churchill resisted taking a newly completed ship out of service and the upgrade was delayed until 1915. The director was central to accurate long-range fire, which battlecruisers needed to exploit speed and choose a favorable engagement distance. Later pressure to send Second World War destroyers to sea without modern fire-control systems makes the same point: visible availability can be mistaken for combat readiness. Queen Mary later appears to have received Dreyer equipment in place of her Pollen table. Backup control tables in B turret, and possibly X turret, also illustrate the importance of redundancy when centralized control was damaged.