Murphy's Law of Battleships

[besilarius]

Thanks Mike F. Murphy's Laws for Dreadnoughts

1. Unsinkable ships... aren't.
2. The enemy fleet will see you before you see them.
3. Battleships almost never run out of shells, and they seldom run out of fuel. However, they sometimes run out of luck.
4. Train your lookouts well, because your radar will break down at the most inopportune moment.
5. Torpedoes that hit you will either hit the thickest part of your armor and do no serious damage, or hit your screws or rudder and cripple you with one hit. There is no middle ground.
6. Be nice to your escorting destroyers. They're the ones who will fish you out of the drink if things go wrong.
7. The secondary armament won't see any action, unless they can double as AA guns.
8. Sorry, Admiral Fisher. Speed is NOT armor.
9. No matter how you try to compensate, your first salvos will always fall short.
10. Just because the other ship can't penetrate your ship's armor doesn't mean you're safe. Your superstructure is not armored. Neither are you.
11. Treating your battle-cruisers like substitute battleships is a good way to lose your battle-cruisers.
12. If your navy relies on a canal for strategic ship movements, expect a rival nation to make ships so big that a similar ship won't fit through your canal.
13. Every battleship design has an unknown weak spot.
14. Enemy fire will unerringly seek out that weak spot.
15. Other nations always lie about their battleships' displacements.
16. Torpedo tubes on a battleship are about as useful as nipples on a boar hog.
17. When we get to Heaven, we will find people there who are still arguing about whether the Bismarck scuttled herself or not.
18. To a 750-ton submarine, your 35,000-ton battleship is nothing but a target.
19. Your ship is just as likely to take damage from friendly sources (blast damage, collisions, running aground) as from enemy fire.
20. Flag signals that can't possibly be misunderstood... will be.
21. Your deck armor isn't thick enough.
22. If your ship sinks, it will never land in a position that will help future researchers figure out why it sank

[Martok]

Yep.  Those all sound about right.