The G3 Battlecruisers

The G3 battlecruisers were much better ships than the German Bismarck class ships built much later. The G3's were faster, at 31-32 knots, had thicker side armour (14in vs. 12.5in) and had thicker deck armour (8in vs. 4.5in). The G3's also out-gunned the Bismarck, with 9-16in, against the Bismarck's 8-15in. The G3's were marred by the bizarre layout, but aside from that, they would have been really extraordinary ships. E. L. Attwood and Stanley Goodall were to some degree running amock, in the sense that they wanted to take all sorts of extreme measures to achieve the best possible performance from a given displacement. D. K. Brown has a good discussion of what happened in this book The Grand Fleet.