With Norway secured I expect a lot of industrial upgrading to happen in the Trondelag; it has strategic depth against conceivable German attempts to try to invade again and is farther out of range of Luftwaffe strikes, and is an excellent port with its approaches very secure, with good communications to Sweden as well as to the world by sea. Postwar Trondheim might quite rival Oslo as a close second city of Norway.
Can such expanded industry there, or perhaps despite slightly greater strategic risk Oslo, be so developed that Norwegians are making lots of aircraft, tanks, guns, etc? I have little clue actually. My baseline assumptions about what they can do in the war are modest, but it could be between the established aeronautical abilities much upgraded (politically, Norwegian firms will have little trouble getting licenses for the most advanced material they can technically produce; Norway is probably the most committed Ally Britain could have and quite as solidly In and reliable, if not more so, than Britain in Yankee evaluations) and upgrades of her shipyards, I don't want to place any hard upper limits on what they can do.
I would guess no Norwegian shipyard could produce a capital ship, a full sized battleship or big carrier--they might well be able to make their own model of armored escort carriers though.
Armored decks, of the British philosophy of carrier design, are favored in the crowded short range airspace of European coastal waters; even if the Norwegians wind up getting some carriers, small or big, from American shipyards, they will be specifying British type armored decks, unless later in the war they commit to some token support of US-Commonwealth RN initiatives in the Pacific. In the wide waters and long ranges of the Pacific, the US lighter unarmored approach permitted more aircraft, which were conceived by US thinkers as the actual defense of a carrier; God help them if an enemy force managed to get in striking range, but the idea was not to be there to be struck but to get their strikes in first.
I leave it up to the author whether Norwegian naval aviation gets any carriers at all, whether they stick with small ones that can be sustained and possibly even built in Norway, or whether they are gifted with British or American made big ones, all versus relying mainly on sea planes.
If Norway's flying boat works are never upgraded enough to make either license copies or their own homegrown design of heavy flying boats comparable to the Sunderland or American four engine jobs, surely they can anyway maintain them, along with smaller Catalinas or again some Norwegian analog, and perhaps a whole lot of smaller seaplanes too, with floats or boat hulls. The latter can surely operate out of shore bases, and perhaps with new larger seaplane tenders, maybe out on the wider ocean; Catalinas and of course the bigger monsters can operate on the wide ocean quite well, as experience in the Pacific as well as Atlantic demonstrated.
By any route, I do think Norway is eventually going to be a player, at least in token proportion to her relative wealth versus USA and Commonwealth, in the Pacific. Probably not until late in the war to be sure, perhaps not at all until after V-E day, but that might come earlier than OTL--I would guess not by more than a year to be sure, and that is optimistic.
I can't resist an aviation-related suggestion that might be more appealing to the naval-oriented author than I usually have been. I'm thinking of a unique ship design you see.
I would expect that later in the war, around 1943 or so, with the Axis being clearly on the back foot though a long slog is ahead, while Norway won't be asked to join in the Pacific actively until Europe is sorted out, everyone is looking ahead to that hoped for day. Meanwhile the navally canny Norwegians have been spending some time reading reports of the Pacific war as well as their own experiences in the Atlantic/Mediterranean theater--indeed while I don't expect actual Norwegian fleet elements to go "East of Suez" (they'll probably actually sortie via the Panama Canal when the day comes unless some of their ships exceed Panamax size, which I am getting at here, maybe) I do think at least some officers will be detached to RN and USN ships to assist and observe first hand in the Pacific. So--they are learning, with less resistance than the battleship-minded senior USN and RN officers, since Norway did not start the war with any actual battlewagons, that while the battleship in classic form is not totally obsolete by any means (their heavy guns were quite useful for bombardment, vital in island hopping against Japan, and their heavy armor had other uses, and so admirals often continued to use them as flagships) the modern real capital ship is the carrier. And maybe they want and will get some carriers, big or small.
But they like seaplanes, their prewar seaplane tenders have played a big part in their self-salvation, will no doubt continue to play important roles (it always gives me chills to see the names Odin and Loki come up in your accounts,
@CV(N)-6!). And one role the heavy battleship armor enables a battleship in WWII carrier combat to play usefully is, a heavy armored platform for massive AA gun installation.
So supposing that in generous Lend-Lease offers, Uncle Sam wants to reward the Norwegians with some top line new capital ships, and a new battleship or two is on offer for a cheap or even basically free price, the Yankees politically appreciating Norway having paid in blood.
But the Norwegians don't actually want a
traditional battleship, leaving the shore bombardment mission to the big navies.
However, they do see a use for a big heavy armored flagship, that can take a lot of punishment by naval gun or aerial strike, and dish out very heavy AA cover for other fleet elements clustered near it including their carriers. And replacing the big gun turrets, they devote the capacity to partitioned fuel and ammo and machine shop facilities to make a much glorified seaplane tender, capable of maintaining some big flying boats and a fair number of Catalina types and perhaps even some seaborne small fighter/attack type planes largely afloat.
I am picturing, instead of the big gun turrets, an advanced super-crane, a cherry picker type articulating design, with negative feedback sensor (hydraulic-electric of course) operation, so that a hard coupling to a floating object such as a big 4 engine seaplane of the Sunderland type can bob up and down with the waves bouncing the plane, without putting stress on the plane.
Such a super crane can incorporate lines for fueling and perhaps other fluids (maybe a pressurized hydraulic line to power tools on the aircraft, or of course electric or possibly pneumatic--if such a line is severed it won't be electrically live or spray hydraulic fluid all over--and feature a suspension conveyor system for solid loads such as ammo packs, also to haul wounded crew members back to the ship in litters, etc. So, a big seaplane nudges up near the ship, the crane operator (possibly based on a platform on the business end of the crane) sidles up to a hard mount on the wing center with a hatch in it, locks the sensor-guided feedback control in place, so the crane now bobs up and down and swings with the differential motion of the plane, and crew hook up the fuel lines, and any wounded crew are taken off followed by off-shift aircrew riding the conveyor back to the mother ship while the new relief crew comes aboard, receiving and stowing packets of hardware like ammo where needed, in a quick operation permitting the crane to move on to another plane in pretty short order; the big flying boat heads off on another sortie.
Smaller flying boats can be serviced rapidly the same way; the big crane can also pick up at least the medium and small seaplanes to put them in service bays on deck for more extensive maintenance. I'm wondering if in fact the biggest flying boat types might be lifted up and serviced the same way as needed.
The planes have to be designed for this of course, more or less; small planes can probably be serviced mainly by being fished up onto the deck, pretty much as is, the multi-engine ones would need their fuel line feeds and so forth routed to this central feed, and if they are to be picked up, to have structural reinforcement to let one single strong grip on a standard grapple point safely lift their weight and inertial mass. But after all, an airplane must be suspended from the wing center--seaplanes, flying boat types especially, tend to be high wing jobs, so if the basic wing box is designed or retrofitted with a suitable grip, streamlined in flight under a fabric or light metal hatch, I'd think this would not be a huge design issue, even for retrofitting.
The giant crane (or cranes, redundancy as well as parallel servicing capability seems like a good idea if one can manage it) might also facilitate more rapid transfers of supplies and even aircraft between task force elements; cargo ships with their cargo suitably palletized might sidle up close, get a series of pallets of replenishment cargo including whole aircraft, picked up and placed for processing on the deck, lashed down if the seas are rough, and then the ship can transfer some of this cargo to other task force units such as a flattop or several baby flattops, cruisers, destroyers, etc.
So basically, a heavy armored, huge, deluxe big sister successor of the seaplane tenders really, able to endure punishment during a major battle and still keep on maintaining her brood of seaplanes. This strikes me as the proper flagship of any Norwegian presence in the Pacific, by the time the Norwegians get there the danger of kamikaze strikes is well known so her heavy AA is vital cover to other task force members. In addition to seaplane tending it is also a logistics hub and also, I suppose, a major mount for intensive radar and sonar operations.
So a weird hybrid of Aegis cruiser/seaplane tender/catalyst of more effective and rapid seaborne replenishment. During combat I figure the crane(s) can retract into armored bays to prevent being crippled.
For some reason I want to name it Freya or Vanaheim, maybe Heimdall--Thor does not seem quite right, though certainly among other things Thor is a smith god, and as a seaplane tender it would be among other things a machine shop ship.
Is such a ship possible on the base of an armored battleship hull, within OTL WWII late war displacements? Could it not go as fast or faster than typical battleships? Were late war Allied naval capital ships designed to get through the Panama Canal or were some a lot bigger and if so, would the Norwegians want the Panama Canal capable version, or would they want and be able to handle an even bigger one that has go around the south of Africa or South America to get between the major oceans?
I suspect that even if the war pretty well sticks to OTL timelines overall, the royal Norwegian Navy can see a monster or two of this type put in useful service and come under fire in the Pacific before Japan finally surrenders. Late in the war, the seaplanes would be serving as commerce attack platforms, ASW scouts and attackers, and various auxiliary missions such as search and rescue and airlifting supplies to various scattered bases rapidly.
I could also have some fun trying to envision high performance seaplanes--indeed I have often posted about the possibilities of hydrofoil designs, which might enable most of the performance of a landplane on a platform that can land and take off from the water, and be stationed there...but I suspect such designs would actually come to fruition after the war. This brings up the possibility of a jet seaplane, hopefully less clumsy than the SARO job, perhaps based on a delta type planform serving as a raft --not unlike the Convair Sea Dart or its envisioned subsonic predecessor; the Sea Dart suffered from several design issues that submerged hydrofoils might solve--an early design realized well before the '40s were out would not even attempt sonic speed capability, the Sea Dart's ancestor was to be a blended body form designed as a raft.
