Outwardly, the Torture-class shares many characteristics with the Eldar Shadow- and Eclipse-class Cruisers, leading to many cases of mistaken identity and even the experts of the Imperial Navy's Fleet Institute of Alien Studies mistakenly classified the Torture-class as a variant of those vessels. Some accounts do indeed seem to indicate that Torture-class starships are some sort of amalgam of these Eldar starship classes, while other encounters reveal characteristics so divergent in both configuration and armament that it only becomes more difficult to properly classify these vessels. Accounts of Eldar vessels of slightly differing configurations attacking one another adds even more confusion to Imperial attempts to clarify the truth.