Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "RN Regina Elena - Guide 346" video.

Not only were the Elenas retained by the Washington Treaty, the treaty also listed the da Vinci as a serving battleship, when it was in reality nothing but a refloated hull. My dislike of waste says another party to the treaty should have been able to transfer a couple ships, that otherwise would be scrapped for treaty compliance, to Italy, for scrap value, to replace the Elenas, but Italy probably would not have wanted the cost of running them.
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@stormy0307 I agree a mongrel fleet is not ideal from a supply standpoint, but if you order a Yarrow widget, you should receive a Yarrow widget, not an Ansaldo widget. The fact that the RM used several German and Austrian ships for a number of years, rather than scrapping them outright, as the UK, US, and France did, with their war reparations ships, tells me the supply problems paled at the prospect of a free ship. In the case of battleships, the RM would not have wanted UK castoffs anyway, due to the running costs. While the RM was happy to run Austrian and German cruisers and destroyers, they sent the Tegetthoff to the breakers as soon as they received her. I did some back-of-the-envelope figuring a while back. The RM had a significant destroyer building program in the 20s. I figured that, if they had foregone about half of those destroyers, they would have had enough money to complete Caracciolo, but the RM's priorities said destroyers, not battleships.
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@stormy0307 Italy received several ex-Austrian and German cruisers and destroyers after WWI, and operated many of them into the 1930s. Other powers, like Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Japan, and Russia ran a hodgepodge of British, German, Italian, and French built ships around the same time. Spares did not seem to be an insurmountable problem.
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