>Club Yasen - "Yasen" is Japanese for "night battle". In
>Kantai Collection, Naka's elder sister Sendai is obsessed with
>night battles, to the point where the other kanmusu have nicknamed her
>yasen baka ("the night battle idiot"). In the context of the
>game, night battle literally means continuing the battle after
>nightfall; in the fandom (and encouraged by a number of winky-face
>dialogue lines in game) it has The Obvious Other Meaning as well.

Sendai's obsession being an historical in-joke, as three of the four battles the real Sendai participated in were night battles. "Yasen baka" is one of those fan jokes that the creators adopted, with girls either complaining or noting that she can be heard yelling around the base once the sun goes down. And yes, the...less than pure fan joke was also incorporated in to the game as her marriage line.

>Navy Special No. 5 - Marine heavy fuel oil, also known as
>Bunker B. As Mark Knopfler teaches us, if you wanna run cool, you got
>to run on heavy fuel.

You gotta tell'em! Heavy fuel oil is shipgirls!!

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

>aidoru style - Canonically, Naka does consider herself an idol
>(in the Japanese pop singer sense); that is in fact how she introduces
>herself, as "the fleet's idol, Naka-chan." Here we've branched her
>out a bit, musically speaking.

There's amusement to be had in picturing the j-pop idol becoming a rave DJ. Considering the club's name, I'm guessing Sendai had some part in getting her little sister to put away the frilly skirt.

>fairies - Equipment fairies turn up a lot in KanColle.
>They pilot the miniature airplanes launched by carriers, and represent
>damage control crews and various pieces of equipment (radar sets,
>particular weapons, and so on) in fit-out screens. In some fan
>interpretations, they also operate equipment at sea (gun turrets, for
>example, are sometimes shown being worked by fairy guncrews).

They're treated as the personnel one would expect in a naval fleet, from operating equipment to working in the ship docks. Some of the fairies, particularly ones for pieces of equipment that are unique to certain ships or classes, even look like the ships they belong to. For example, the "prototype flight deck catapult" that's necessary to upgrade Shoukaku and Zuikaku has fairies that resemble the sisters.

>Not all equipment in the game is represented by fairies; sometimes the
>weapons themselves are "personified" as sort-of-robotic sidekicks
>(such as the gun turrets of Amatsukaze, Shimakaze, and the
>Akizuki-class anti-aircraft destroyers). There seems to be no
>consistent pattern to this beyond what a particular ship's artist
>thought would be cute.

Yeah, it's largely at artist's discretion, which has led to some odd situations where ships of the same class wear totally different outfits from their sisters. It actually caused a great deal of consternation when Unryuu was introduced, since fans had based their own mental image of her on the fact that the historical ship was a continuation of the Hiryu class with Soryu's machinery.

At the same time, artists will generally stick to similar themes, which is why Amatsukaze, Shimakaze, and the Akizuki sisters have pet turrets, as Shizuma Yoshinori was responsible for their artwork.

>2-4-11 Projekt - Scrapping Naka in-game yields two units of
>fuel, four ammunition, and 11 steel. She's a common drop and her
>personality annoys some players, so the running (rather cruel) joke in
>fandom is that she gets scrapped a lot. The above is
>presumably not what the name of her act means in-story, but...

Well, it wasn't so much that she was a common drop (all the Sendais are), it's that she can only be gained through construction and has the highest drop rate in any recipe where a light cruiser drop is possible. So admirals would put several hours or days worth of resources into construction looking for a battleship, then get yet another Naka-chan. Since Sendais had no Kai-ni remodel at the beginning and mediocre stats, players got so frustrated with her that they just started reflexively scrapping her.

But like all franchise butt monkeys, what started as a sign of consternation has turned into an affection fan joke. They even wrote her an image song ("2-4-11 of Love") that the game creators got her voice actress to sing. The fact that she and her sisters got Kai-Ni remodels that make them the strongest light cruisers available sort of cushioned the anger towards her still being one of the most common construction drops.

And even as bad as Naka-chan had it, she was still in a better spot than poor Isuzu. After all, nobody was farming Nakas for rare equipment and remodel supplies.

>scrapped once before she was even launched - The Sendai
>class was planned to consist of eight ships, but only four were under
>construction when the Japanese government signed the Washington Naval
>Treaty of 1922, which severely limited Japan's options in regards to
>new construction. The IJN brass decided that all future cruiser
>development would be focused on heavy cruisers; the four
>Sendai-class ships on which construction hadn't yet started
>were canceled, and the two least far along were ordered scrapped on
>the ways. Naka, ship number three, was one of the latter, but
>her demolition was delayed by the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake, after
>which someone reconsidered and she was completed and launched after
>all.
>
>The Washington Treaty and the 1923 earthquake figure large in the
>histories of a number of the most famous IJN ships of World War II,
>and thus of a number of KanColle characters, most notably the
>aircraft carriers Akagi and Kaga (both of which were
>converted from other ships rendered superfluous during construction by
>the treaty, in Kaga's case because Akagi's sister ship
>was too badly damaged by the earthquake for her planned carrier
>conversion to be finished).

Entire books could be written about the effects of the Washington Naval Treaty on ship design and naval strategy since WWI. Without it, the Pacific War might very well have been a contest between battleships and cruisers rather than the carrier duels that it largely became. Or a much bloodier affair as both sides would have been free to build as many large ships as they liked without tonnage limits to force design compromises. It's one of those huge "What If?"'s of world history.