The joke imagines the Royal Navy asking for an unrealistically simple and cheap warship. Experienced designers would expect new sensors, weapons, endurance, and survivability demands to accumulate before the ship reached service. Keeping a larger, mature design ready would therefore turn predictable requirement growth into an opportunity to deliver a coherent ship rather than an overloaded small one. Beneath the joke is a procurement lesson: institutional behaviour and approval cycles can shape displacement as strongly as the original operational requirement.
Notable Point · 3:36:13-3:36:53
Designing for requirement growth in naval procurement
A larger mature design can become the practical answer when a navy expects an initially modest requirement to expand during approval and construction.