An impractical Hermes replacement can still train designers

What was the value of trying to improve on Hermes within 10,000 tons?

The exercise taught constructors how competing design requirements interacted, even when it could not produce an acceptable ship.

Hermes already needed more than 10,000 tons, leaving little obvious room for an improved carrier below that limit. Successive constructors could still learn by trying to reconcile the competing requirements. The fictional Kobayashi Maru exercise provides an analogy for training through a problem that cannot necessarily be solved. Technical progress reduced some weights, but Hermes itself was not especially wasteful in tonnage. The value of the exercise lay in what designers learned about the constraints even if they could not produce a satisfactory ship.