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I was reading some random ship specs, and a couple of questions popped up (well, one of them was older and resurfaced):

1) Why did Italy and Japan spend craploads of money on refurbishing ships with little no combat value?
The old Cavours and Dorias (which themselves were basically improved Cavours) were of little use, even after having their ancient 12-inchers rebored to 12.6. For the manpower and resource cost of refurbishing the four old ships (and still ending up with subpar results), they could have built two more new Littorios.
Same with Japan and the four old Fuso/Ise. Even after the rather expensive refurbishment, they were no match for treaty battleships (NorCals/SoDaks), nevermind "escalator clause" ones. To compare/contrast, the rebuilt Kongos were frail, but could keep up with carriers, while the Nagatos were quite solid (Nagato took two nuclear blasts and still remained afloat for nearly 5 days afterwards).

2) Why did so many navies insist on keeping dual-calibre secondary armament?
The only navies to have unified their secondaries into a single dual-purpose calibre were the Royal Navy and the USN. Everybody else (MN, KM, RM, IJN) used one calibre for surface (usually 6-inch or thereabouts) and another for heavy anti-air (5-inch +/-). Since the secondary surface armament usually had worse fire control than the main guns, their effectiveness was limited at best (especially on old refurbished ships like Kongo, where the guns were casemated).
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