Talk:General Discussion/@comment-5256985-20140819131103/@comment-25139231-20140820224833

All italian ship, altough made during the same period of time as other nation ship, had all a big fault they were made and developed following WWI sea warfare tactics. Only good thing about them were their man cannon, only the cannon as they were lacking computing machines and the newer model of rangefinding and targeting instrument. Their armor was somewhat lacking for ship of that time and they had almost no AA ability even worst because they never tought plane could sink a ship (they really thought it). Totally absence of good instrumentation and absence of radar or sonar. And the worst thing of all their engne (you can have a ship wich have low AA or no radar but their engines was simply a big Troll), they all had coal powered engines (this could have a logistical pourpose as italy did not have any oil source they could only import it from other countries and she was also embargoed, while they had high quantity of coal and they could also count on germany for it, still this were just an escuse the truth is that they lacked the tecnology to do it). Coal powered engines had heavy fault and those were really evident compared to oil powered one, high maintenace cost, high resources consumption, coal combustion make a big black tube out of the ships chimney practically becoming a big arrow that says to all enemy " i am here bombard me" but the worst thing was that it takes 2 to 3 hours to start a coal engines and being able to simply move and other hours to reach maximum power thus making their ability to respond to enemy oil engines ship practically inesistent, enemy ship could get close bombard and go away and the ship would still be ther waiting to be able to move.