Why 25,000-ton battlecruisers were poor Revenge-class replacements

Should Britain have replaced the Revenge class with five fast 25,000-ton battlecruisers and armed the King George V class with triple 15-inch turrets?

No to the small battlecruisers, whose protection and mission fit would be poor; yes to developing triple 15-inch mountings and standardizing on an improved 15-inch gun across the battle fleet.

By the 1930s, machinery power density made a fast battleship more useful than a lightly protected battlecruiser of the proposed size. The slow Revenge-class ships still forced Bismarck or Tirpitz to respect their armour and heavy guns, while Scharnhorst and Gneisenau could avoid an R-class convoy escort only by leaving its convoy intact. A 25,000-ton design with six 14-inch guns would be uncomfortable against either a Kongō-class battlecruiser or a modern fast battleship and might not be fast enough to escape the latter. Speed would not solve the escort problem because convoy work required a ship able to deter or survive contact with enemy capital ships. Continued British development of the 15-inch gun, followed by fleet-wide standardisation, could also have simplified logistics and strengthened later reconstruction options.