Later powers keep trying to reproduce the Warrior moment

John Fisher's Dreadnought program was a deliberate attempt to recreate the strategic shock of HMS Warrior. Stalin's and Hitler's battleship ambitions can be understood as attempts at a related form of psychological overmatch. Japan likewise planned a series of exceptionally powerful ships, with five envisaged in this account of the ambitions behind Yamato. That planned run matters because a single prestige ship would not demonstrate the same production capacity. In the counterfactual, an original benchmark almost twice its rival's displacement would leave later leaders a more extreme standard: a ship that overwhelmingly surpassed its counterparts, backed by additional hulls.