Avanti Design Notes

"the clever and well-protected ammunition stowage of their tanks"

Aside from the ready racks literally lining the inside of the turret armor? (Rounds were mounted vertically.)

There is British evaluation of the M13 that recommends several features for incorporation into British tank designs (none were ever used, to my knowledge). The single worst feature found was that the hearing of the elevation wheel for the gun was so coarse that accurate range adjustment was impossible. Combined with generally poor gunnery training, this was an overwhelming handicap.

As I've been helping with the design of a game in Bir el Gubi, and I've been researching and translating works on Beda Fomm, I've discovered that there are significant distortions in much of the recent English-language publications on North Africa from Italian sources. While Italian accounts were either ignored or unavailable in the past, recent work fails to check Italian accounts against Allied sources for simple facts (what units were engaged--just looking up where they were in given days--and loss reports). Uncritical acceptance of one side's story is never useful, as better understanding of German tank loss reporting procedures has shown.