Hi all, and many thanks for the positive advice. I honestly thought the game was broken, I mean i went from waiting a few seconds for the guns to reload, to waiting half a minute! Then when I was in game about to fire for the first time, I thought that the guns must be powerful, hence the long reload. How wrong I was.
With the Kawachi, I'm just doing once a day to get the xp bonus and that's it. Once that abomination has accumulated enough for Tier IV, you can be sure i'll be scrapping it!
This game has gone through many tests with players and devs, and I'm amazed that everybody who tested the Kawachi thought "Yup, nothing wrong with this ship..."
I've just researched the South Carolina on the US side. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm not wetting my pants with excitement....