German Naval Air

I am a newbie here. My question is this. The Brits filled their ships with way too much cordite before facing the Germans in WW1. HSF in this timeline has a small air fleet( 2 small carriers conversions). Dreadnoughts start sinking from bomb caused cordite fires in their mag.. A swift end to the war, a major ego stroke for the Kaiser?
 

Art

Monthly Donor
Kill Herman Goering...

He had a shitty policy of "EVERYTHING THAT FLIES BELONGS TO MEE!!" The idiot. And Aircraft Carriers take TIME, you don't learn to use them in a week! Only the U. S. A. , the British, the French, and the Japanese had carriers as the war started. The Germans worked on one Carrier, the Graf Zepplin, but didn't finish it before the war ended. They needed multiple Carriers, and didn't get them. Remember, they only had 6 years before the war to build up their fleet, they weren't supposed to have warships over 10,000 tons, or any air force, or tanks. If the French had had the money and the political courage to opose the Germans, them Hitler wouldn't have got the Rhineland back, let alone get Austria and Czechkoslovakia without a shot, the swine.
 

Cook

Banned
Art,

The thread concerns the First World War, not the Second and this is actually a double posting by Soutgun, you’ll find the other thread has a few more replies on it.
 
First off, the OP is talking about the First World War, not the second. Now to answer the original question, I'm not sure that having two converted aircraft carriers would have much of an impact on naval operations. The British heavily mined their waters, so carriers aren't likely to have made it all the way up there in the North Sea to pull off a Pearl Harbor at Scapa Flow. Maybe they might prove useful at the Battle of Jutland, if only for aerial reconnaissance purposes. At the time, I don't think aircraft were able to successfully take down surface ships very easily. I think the first credited sinking of a warship by air attack was performed after the war on a captured German destroyer sitting dead in the water (handed over as part of the disarmament). Even then, it took a few tries for them to sink it.

I know that's not the same as a dreadnought, but I'm thinking that above-the-waterline armor would be roughly the same for destroyers and dreadnoughts.
 
He had a shitty policy of "EVERYTHING THAT FLIES BELONGS TO MEE!!"


Yeah, killing Goering should provide the pre-World War One POD the OP is asking about... :rolleyes:

As for the OP's post, he's completely mistaken regarding cordite and is suffering from the all too common fallacy of "What we know now was known to people in the past".

The power and utility of aircraft and carriers are self-evident in 2011 and were the stuff of science fiction in 1911.
 
The Kaiser

I am sorry, I did not make clear, the conversions were smaller ships(Langely) not (Yorktown). The Kaiser foisted them onto the Fleet. I have been told that RECCE was all 1914 planes were good for. My thought was, bomb the turrets, start cordite fires, then mag. would blow. The bombs carried were not big enough to this, I was told. Wait till later, for torpedoes.
 

Cook

Banned
I am sorry, I did not make clear, the conversions were smaller ships(Langely) not (Yorktown). The Kaiser foisted them onto the Fleet. I have been told that RECCE was all 1914 planes were good for. My thought was, bomb the turrets, start cordite fires, then mag. would blow. The bombs carried were not big enough to this, I was told. Wait till later, for torpedoes.

Consider Zeppelins, which were in service and did have the capacity to carry a bomb load, although I doubt it would be enough to damage a battleship.

Possibly dropping sea mines into the anchorage of Scapa Flow though?
 
I am sorry, I did not make clear, the conversions were smaller ships(Langely) not (Yorktown). The Kaiser foisted them onto the Fleet. I have been told that RECCE was all 1914 planes were good for. My thought was, bomb the turrets, start cordite fires, then mag. would blow. The bombs carried were not big enough to this, I was told. Wait till later, for torpedoes.


Along with doing no research and little thinking, you're putting the cart before the horse here.

In 2011, aircraft are incredibly versatile and powerful weapon systems with a proven track record nearly a century long. In 2011, carriers are arguably still the Queens of the Sea with an ability to project power over vast distances and have been acknowledged as such for almost seventy years.

Here's your problem: Before WW1 no one knows this. You're mistakenly assuming what we know in 2011 was also known in 1911.

The Kaiser foists two carriers on the High Seas Fleet? Why?. People have just begun flying single planes off makeshift flight platforms mounted on the turrets of various cruisers and battleships. Why is the Kaiser going to make the leap from those few experiments to building a ship with a full flight deck launching and recovering multiple planes?

You want planes used for reconnaissance? How? Primitive radio transmitters for airplanes weren't developed until almost three years after WW1 began and then thanks to the need to observe artillery fire. Before that, recon by aircraft over land or sea involved either landing or dropping messages to report what had been seen. Why will those transmitters be developed earlier than they were? Because if they aren't maritime airplane recon isn't going to be useful.

You want planes dropping ordnance? Huh? Before the need arose during WW1, airplanes didn't have weapons mounted at all and during the first year or so of the war "bombing" amounted to the pilot tossing out ordnance by hand. Why will the Kaiser's airplanes be mounting large bombs or torpedoes before the war?

Before the war the German navy did plan on using aerial recon during the war. Zeppelins filled the role. They could carry and power radio transmitters. They had the range and endurance too. Their navigation was spotty and bomb sights beyond primitive, so their bombing capabilities were almost useless, but they're what the Germans could most plausibly have before WW1 so they're what you're stuck with...

... until you do the work necessary to create a POD beyond "The Kaiser ordered it done."
 

Art

Monthly Donor
OH!!!

Sorry, Sorry!! Didn't see it was WW1, not WW2! Billy Michell, with aircraft much better than any flown in WW1, was not able to prove that heavy warships needed AA guns and were becoming too expensive. He was ahead of his time. And yeah, radios small enough to use on a aircraft of the period 1900-1920 are not invented yet. These are the spark-gap transmitters, not even V. tubes have been invented yet!
 
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