tlb wrote:The SLN became like the British Admiralty that saw no reason to worry about planes or submarines. Even the steam turbine caused them shock and embarrassment. Some of this was just bureaucratic inertia within the Solarian League Navy and some was due active subversion by the Malign.
Though that's generally unfair to the British Admiralty. From the start of the age of steam up until the Dreadnaught building race with Germany they held the advantage that the British warship building industry dwarfed any other countries (both in capacity and, less dramatically, in build times).
That advantage in shipbuilding meant they could afford to take a wait and see approach - trying out new technologies ashore, seeing how they worked in warships ordered from British private yards for foreign navies, or in one off experimental ships. Then if another country started a major building program they'd be in good position to exploit their superior shipbuilding capacity to lay down ships to counter the enemy, likely get them in service first, and build more of them to boot.
For example they'd been playing around with ideas for armored steam frigates for a while before the French laid down Gloire - the Admiralty quickly adopted plans for a larger, faster, and more powerful ironclad, HMS Warrior, and got her and her sister ship HMS Black Prince into service not long after Gloire.
And the RN was an early adopter of aircraft (they had a seaplane carrier that was supposed to be at Jutland but was left behind due to a signaling snafu. And they'd launched several seaplane carrier raids during WWI, and in WWII their attack on Taranto showed what a carrier strike could do against battleships in harbor over a year before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
They were somewhat hampered in their push for aircraft power during the interwar period by having the Naval Air Service taken away and merged into the Royal Air Force after WWI. It took then a while to get control of their own aircraft (and designs) back -- but even then the naval aircraft they had when the war started in 1939 were competitive and sometimes superior to those in USN and IJN service -- but actually fighting a war slowed the development and deployment of new generations of aircraft so with over 2 years more peacetime than the RN enjoyed their aircraft at the end of 1941 generally were now a generation, if not two, behind those entering USN and IJN service and so compared unfavorable with them.
In terms of AA defenses due to the threat of aircraft the RN similarly took the lead, being a very early leader in equipping ships with any AA guns at all - and in the early interwar period developed platforms to allow battleships to launch defending fighters to break up any aircraft attacks on the fleet. And of course they got into non-seaplane carriers before anyone else, also in part to provide fighter cover to the fleet (a good CAP being the best initial AA defense).
But like all navies in the interwar period they failed to anticipate just how much land and naval aircraft would improve by late 1941, much less by mid-1945. And so while they'd been early in getting AA aboard they, like every navy, had insufficient amounts of it. And again having to go to war over 2 years before the perceived gold standard navy in AA guns (the USN) masks the fact than in 1939 the RN had better AA defenses for their ships than the USN did. But again, over 2 years of getting to watch how the war played out gave the USN time to learn some lessons by observation rather than firsthand pain and start redressing their deficiencies in AA.
Basically the idea that the RN Admiralty was technophobic and slow to recognize new threats and adapt to them is in no small part an overblown myth. Comparing them to the SLN is a major insult to the RN of the early to mid 20th century.