The Lord Nelson reconstruction substitutes six 8-inch guns for the historical 9.2-inch secondary battery as the closest workable equivalent. A more literal nine-inch arrangement cannot reproduce the historical placement with the available mounts. Recreating the Deutschland class also requires compromises in displacement, funnels, secondary armament, and torpedo tubes. The difficulty of fitting those systems gives a sense of how crowded and specialized real pre-dreadnought layouts could be.
Notable Point · 4:06-8:40
Reconstructing late pre-dreadnought gun batteries
Limits in the game help explain why late pre-dreadnoughts had difficult mixed-calibre batteries and crowded layouts.