Historynerd

Caliber is not synonimous with efficiency, reliability and performance. The 16-inch Mark I gun fitted on the Nelson-class was an unsuccessful weapon, with only marginal improvement in terms of armor penetration compared to the 15-inch Mark I fitted on the older battleships- While its caliber was low, the 14-inch Mark VII fitted on the KGV was overall a good weapon, capable of faring well against the other European guns, i.e. the French, German and Italian 15-inch guns. I agree. About the 15-inch guns... well, it can surely be described as a very successful and reliable weapon, no one can argue against that; and they were still thoroughly useful, by all means. However, in terms of pure performance, those weren't quite on par with the latest WWII guns. It might have emerged more clearly, had the battleships been involved in more engagements.

Not very funny, IMHO...

On a light note, I took up reading the 4 koma manga on MangaFox. The last chapter is about the Pasta sisters.

So, it seems that Libeccio thinks that the Warspite is a pretty powerful BB... since she mentioned her explicitly by name, does it mean anything? Given the ambiguity about the whole Allies ships stuff, some people are saying that this means a shift in the official policy...

...Did we all just got schooled?

Your problem was that, other than being much ruder, you also began to rant at the system and at the noobs. And the use of the word "unfair" was a guarantee that everybody would take what you wrote as whining. And you also showed ignorance about how the penalty/fine system worked, so this didn't help you either. The OP in this situation has exposed the facts in a much calmer and measured way, without filling his thread with insults and with all-capped words, and without whining about the unfairness of the system. That's the right way. If you want to be treated the same way, then you should take notes and behave similarly, and you will see that you will be treated better. But if you come here to rant (and I mean ranting in an illogical and angry way), don't be surprised or hurt if people begin to troll you.

Alright, always spinning propellers are not very realistic... but neither is having the ships going from full stop to flank speed in a matter of seconds... IRL a ship usually took hours to get going. So, yes, it could be fixed, but that does not seem like a vital priority to me... it can wait a little.

How about this? The sailors of HMAS Sydney around the hole made by an Italian 152 mm shell, after the Battle of Cape Spada.

I'm not sure wheter it's a good thing... I admit that on Tirpitz it seemingly didn't have such a devastating effect that I feared, but on this there was the reason that there were torpedo launchers that could be aimed, while on most other torpedo-armed battleships the tubes were fixed and it was up to the torpedo's gyro systems to do the aiming...

Submerged torpedo tubes were a common feature on battleships up to the Nelson-class, but from then on, apart from Tirpitz (that got launchers added in a refit on its deck), no new battleship was built with torpedo tubes or launchers, and those on the older battleships were usually removed. Besides, about the instance that you mentioned, at that point it was more like practice shooting... Bismarck was already a wreck, she couldn't maneuver or fire back. I think that in this case the DDs supposed to sink the Tirpitz may be the British ones...

There are, but two were already sunk.

Yes, that's true; both battleship were incomplete when they had to fight for the first time. Hmm... well, some might consider that, but if we look at the displacement (well below than the limits), at the low-ish caliber of their main guns and at the armor scheme, which on Dunkerque was meant to defeat only 280 mm shells, other than the confusion regarding their status (considered by some as battleships and by others as battlecruisers), we can agree that the Littorios have a better claim, I think. Yes, as said by Deamon93, especially the rebuilds of the two Duilios proved a costly mistake, as it created a bottleneck in the supply of armor plates and other vital components (in a time when Italy was subjected to sanctions, to boot) that meant that the first modern battleship ended up being fully in commission when the war had already started. However, in terms of having a "prototype" class, I think that Italy was at a heavy disadvantage in this respect, not only because the opportunity of radically rebuilding its old battleships was there and ripe for the taking, but also because it was much less able to cope with the high costs that are met when building from scratch a new class of ships (guns, equipment, etc.). France and the USA were able to focus on new ships, while Italy's economy strongly pointed the naval and political leadership towards trying to make do with what was already available. The two Dunkerques, with their displacement and main guns' caliber well below treaty limits, cannot be considered IMHO as "pure" Treaty battleships. Besides, while the first two battleships of the Littorio-class were laid down as a response to them, they showed an attention to the balance between firepower, protection and speed that is usually not shown when a class is meant to be just a response to another. In my opinion, that shows that in themselves, the Italian battleships were meant as the instrument of an Italian fleet capable of facing all opponents that could conceivably be found in the Mediterranean, not merely ships more powerful than the two French battleships, in the same degree as with them being superior to the German ones.

...Yeah, pretty much. Lacking a clearer classification, this one should work.

Yes, but the majority of the stocks were owned by John Brown and Vickers-Armstrong. Just to say, the armament for some Italian battleships came from firms such as the Armstrong-Pozzuoli and the Vickers-Terni; although based in Italy and Italian companies, it would be disingenuous to claim that as a result these naval guns were Italian-made. It's pretty much the same thing with these ships...

Ehm... what about the nickname someone gave the Fubuki...?

I heard somebody calling her "Derporado"...

Some cruisers even had 305 mm guns (like the Ibuki-class)!

Now that I looked around a bit for a British premium, how about this? HMS Arno; under construction in 1914 at Ansaldo, Genoa, for the Portuguese Navy as Liz, purchased by the Royal Navy and commissioned under the aforementioned name; sunk after a collision with HMS Hope out of the Dardanelles on 23 March 1918. The only foreign-built destroyer purchased for service in the Royal Navy... and it was Italian!

No, the Murmansk was simply transferred to Russia as it was; these Spanish ships were designed and built with foreign assistance, but they weren't modified copies of British ships, although some choices reflected the British philosophy.

Not quite... both the España- and the Canarias-class were built in Spain, but by companies composed by British firms like Vickers and others, for example.

Umm.... "Pepsicola"...?

Of course, this is very down the "to-do" list... but there's no damage done in thinking ahead, is there? Besides, in the Spanish Civil War Italy was quite involved also on the naval front... there was an unofficial support in form of Italian submarines that, pretending to be Nationalists, attacked shipping headed for Republican ports (ironically, without much success, it was the first warning bell that the Italian submarine doctrine was not quite adequate). It was in this context that an Italian submarine attacked and torpedoed a large ship (meaning larger than a destroyer) for the first time, the Republican light cruiser Miguel de Cervantes, by the submarine Torricelli in 1936.

...Well, that was pretty much guaranteed, since Spain was neutral in both world wars. Still, it might provide some ships for a mixed tree... it's worth considering some possibilities.

Well, the Japanese managed to build and get working their own shipbuilding industry pretty early on, as by the 1920s they were pretty much independent; Russia is more blurred. The USA, the UK, Germany and France were all on their own since at least the late XIXth century, Italy was pretty much independent at the same time of Japan (and before that its dependence was mainly about the weaponry).

Well, I hope that one day it will come here to WoWs too, without having to wait five years or something like that...