Comments by "" (@RedXlV) on "IJN Satsuma - Guide 314" video.

It seems to me that Japan's best choice for the Satsumas would've been similar to what Britain did to speed up Dreadnought's completion: swipe some turrets and guns from other, less important ships. Lord Nelson and Agamemnon didn't enter service until 2 years after Dreadnought, because their 12"/45 turrets were put on Dreadnought instead. This meant only 2 guns and 1 turret actually had to be built for Dreadnought, but afterward replacement guns and turrets had to be built for Lord Nelson and Agamemnon to be completed. Mikasa was given a rather extravagant refit from 1906-1908 that replaced her pair of 12"/40 turrets with 12"/45s. And 2 each of the Tsukuba- and Ibuki-class armoured cruisers and Katori-class battleships (all also armed with a pair of 12"/45 twin turrets) were still under construction at the time Satsuma was laid down (though some would soon be completed). If Japan had been willing to delay any of those ships until more 12"/45s could be built, that's a total of 14 turrets and 28 barrels to work with. Whereas completing Satsuma and Aki to their original design would only divert away 16 barrels and 4 turrets (the single turrets for the wing mounts would've still needed to be built from scratch).
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Honestly, most of those Russian ships were a significant waste of resources for Japan to keep in service. Very few of them were modern enough to actually be worth the effort and expense. They were more kept in service for symbolic reasons. The Japanese were rather bitter about how their decisive victories gained them very little new territory and no reparation payments from Russia. So they were intent on keeping everything they had had managed to seize from Russia, even the stuff that was worthless.
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"Dreadnoughts" are defined by uniform main caliber. A dreadnought with VTE engines is still a dreadnought. "Semi-dreadnoughts" (which is what the Satsumas are considered to be) are late pre-dreadnoughts that have an all big gun main armament, but one that's not uniform in caliber. "Big gun" is generally considered to encompass anything from the British 9.2"/47 and up.
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That was when it first got obvious that Wargaming was penny-pinching by skipping low-tier ships. It used to be that battleship lines always started at Tier 3, Destroyers at Tier 2, and Cruisers at Tier 1. Now they routinely skip lower tiers even when one or more obvious candidates exist to fill it. The Pan-Asia cruiser line, for example, had no reason to skip tiers 2-4, which unlike tiers 6-10 could've had real rather than made-up cruisers fill them. The 2nd US battleship line could also have easily been a full line spanning tiers 3-10 instead of a mini-line from only 8-10. The Russian CL/CA split could've kept Kirov in the tech tree (instead of becoming one of 4 Tier 5 Soviet premium cruisers) and had the CA line start at Tier 4.
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@bkjeong4302 Almost certainly still dreadnought, because HMS Dreadnought would've still beaten Satsuma into service. There was no way Satsuma was ever going to match Dreadnought's building time of just 366 days.
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@davidwright7193 That's because American shipyards were at the time a good deal slower than the British ones. The fact remains that by starting the race as soon as possible, Fisher gave the British a huge head start in the construction of dreadnoughts. A lead that Britain never relinquished until the Washington Naval Treaty forced everybody to put the race on hold for a decade.
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Gunnery training is still important, and shooting up a real battleship means you're not only training crews, you're also testing your shells to make sure they work properly. As well as getting a better understanding of how to improve your armor scheme on future battleships.
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@vikkimcdonough6153 At the distances you'd start firing on the enemy, yes. It'd still be similar enough to present a problem.
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