depends on the damage they take at Pearl.
Pearl has a decent shipyard but several damaged BB's will quickly tax it and you need the base's facilities for minor repairs and upgrades to the other ship classes, esp. the carriers.
One has to be careful here as taking them out of dock too soon (aka too much major damage...esp FLOOD) and trying to get them to the West Coast shipyards can result in them being lost to incremental damage along the way. The lesser damaged BB's i send immediately (under heavy escort) back to the W Coast....followed by the badly damaged ones as soon as they can safely do it.
Repaired or intact BB's i leave at Pearl. Having intact BB's sit on the West Coast is a waste IMO (it was done historically to as a sort of last line of defense) This way they can be used if needed. (such as to attach to important convoys that route through Pearl via San Fran/Seattle/LA)
only con is if the Japan player tries to attack Pearl again but if you have enough defenses at the base, only a seriously brave or sneaky player is going to risk that. (i'd personally only contemplate it if i figure the Allied player has stripped Pearl of units)
TDS systems are not represented in the game engine. BB's resistance to torps is a combination of penetration value and warhead vs. belt armor and DUR of the ship in question.
a weakness of the system is that even the biggest BB's (aka Yamato) won't meaure up to the real life resistance. For example a Yamato can be consistantly crippled if not sunk by around a half dozen torp hits.
Sometimes too....a torpedo hit will do next to nothing even though it penetrates the belt armor. That also happened in my example. Both New Mexicos took a torp, But NM only suffered 2% SYS and Flt damage. The gods of dice rolls favored me. Unfortunately her sister took serious ENG and FLT damage from two hits. Not enough to sink.....but enough to badly damage.
Reminder too.....moderate to high levels of major flood damage will more often than not result in additional flooding unless you get the ship to a port fast. (you'll see messages during the combat phase like "temporary flooding repairs failing aboard such and such") Higher the major damage.....more likely it'll happen.
Repair ships can be life savers but even with one nearby nursing a big battlewagon back to a shipyard can be precarious and time consuming.
Worth risking? all comes down to your needs and how much you feel like gambling. I gambled...and came out with a draw. Losing a BB was hard but it bought me some breathing space as the AI in my game is seriously aggressive and was moving the Chains so to speak faster than i could establish my network. In hindsight i probably should have avoided combat but I was in a hurry. Sometimes you just gotta use what's available.
