khairy,
Unfortunately, you will not see the Dunk's potential until your crew is in its 80s. The spread is very bad at level, and it will take a lot of shells to do good damage.
Regarding Soft Defense, briefly - You can find out your SD by looking at your ship's "Defensive Power" listing. This is found when in the shipyard, on the left side of the screen, in the blue box where you select your armor settings. For example, if your "Defensive Power" is 900, you are said to have 900 SD (the current maximum).
Soft Defense can be said to absorb damage without reducing your DP immediately. If you take 1,000 dmg and you have 900SD, your ship will lose 100DP immediately, and "burn" for an additional 900DP. However, during this "burning", your repairers will work, lessening the amount of DP you ultimately lose.
With that covered, your support crew is really holding you back. Generally, support sailors don't really start to contribute until the lvl 50s. Then, they start to help significantly at lvl 60-80.
At lvl 44, your engineers are probably SLOWING your ship down because of their weight being more than their contributed ENGINE ability. The solution? Use a ship +/- 10 lvls away from your sailors. In this case, a lvl 44 engineer should be being leveled on a PCA Furious (lvl 48), a county (lvl 43), or a Revenge (lvl 56). I would probably recommend the Revenge since you can do BB damage while still getting 82% of your experience. 82% of a higher number will probably be more than 100% of lower experience gain. Plus, in GB2 you receive exp based on your ship's level (higher level ships gets more of the share of exp).
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