I'll agree with this; in some work I have been doing on the Royal Navy there are several instances of (a) ships having their guns simply replaced because of barrel wear - no reason some limited upgrading could not be done then, (b) having gun mountings changed, especially of secondary armament, to allow high elevation shooting, and (c) having main armament turrets removed to allow other things to be fitted (anti-sub hedgehogs, more AA armament, 'HQ' type facilities such as air direction centres, etc.).
Having said this, Johan said it would be moddable...
Removing turrets was a massive job and rarely done unless part of a major refit. Not sure I can think of whole turret removal for capital ships except for Ise and Hyuga. Even the stuff hauled up from Pearl Harbour did not have new turrets fitted.
Cruisers: yes. Some ships had aft turrets removed and the D class cruisers were being refitted as AA Cruisers durung the 30's for example. But to take the Queen Elizabeth class as an example, of the five ships in class Valiant and Q.E were at the apex of refits, Warspite in the middle with Barham and Malaya unchanged since their major refits in the early 30's. The 'R's were pretty much left alone with only the addition of some AA. Renown was heavily modernised, Repulse was barely touched. Famously, Hood was due for a major refit that was cancelled on the outbreak of war.
In other words, although ships were of the same class, their capabilities were wildly different in many cases. Equally, as they had not ben refitted, the 'R's 15" guns had range limited to that of a modern 8" gun.
Another factor is pretty key: gunnery technology. Its no point having a big gun that cannot hit anything, as the Italians found out early on in WW1. The myriad of Admiralty Tables or Pollen Clocks or whatever plus the later additions of both detection and gunnery radar later in the war. I personally found it very odd in HoI2 that you put lots of research into Radar but this had no effect at all on the abilities of your Naval units, either in ASW or Surface Gunnery.
As an aside, post war the USN tested a wide array on capital ship guns. The study found that the RN 15" Mk1 was the best, despite its age. They factored in maintenance, accuracy, rate of fire and barrel wear as well as hitting power.
K
