HSF Air

I am new here. I would like to pose an AU. Just before WW1, the Kaiser has 1-2 ships converted to aircraft carriers. Small number, little training but flying with bombs. The Brits set sail, just as they did(OTL), with too much cordite on board.They feared not having enough against the Germans. Brits are attacked by air. Turrets damaged, fires started, leading to mag. explosions. How much will the Brits lose under these conditions? Will loses truly be bad enough to force England leaving the war?
 

Cook

Banned
Prior to world War One aircraft were little more than large box kites, the range of most was miniscule and the ‘bombs’ dropped by them were little more than grenades. Dropping such a ‘bomb’ onto a battleship with multiple inches of armour would be lucky to scratch the paint work, assuming you actually hit the ship anyway, or got within close range of the ship, whose top speed into a head wind would have exceeded the aircraft of the day.

Aircraft armed with such ‘bombs’ posed little threat to anyone but themselves. Their task at the start of the war was the same as their primary task throughout; reconnaissance.
 
The Brits set sail, just as they did(OTL), with too much cordite on board.They feared not having enough against the Germans. Brits are attacked by air. Turrets damaged, fires started, leading to mag. explosions. How much will the Brits lose under these conditions? Will loses truly be bad enough to force England leaving the war?

The British will lose none. The Royal Navy does not carry 'too much cordite on board'. They do have a problem with cordite not being handled correctly, especially aboard the battlecruiser force. British anti-flash provisions are fairly good overall, except for the battlecruiser force which removed protective doors in order for them to achieve higher rates of fire.

Your WI is unrealistic.
 
What about simply having a larger number of planes (equipped with radio) as artillery spotters? A higher artillery accuracy would help much more than a couple of meager bombs.
 
I believe that radios at that time were a bit too heavy for that.

Proposal: Zeppelins dropping bombs with chemical warheads on Scapa Flow.
 
This is likely a bit too much unlikely, as the state of aircraft in the entire WW1 period is so that non was considered strong enough to haul the needed weight of ordonance to succesfully attack capital ships of the period, even the ones with relatively thin armored decks. All capital ships at least had an armored deck of one inch, or more, making the use of normal payloads rather useless, as AP bombs were something not invented yet.

Had the Germans tried to modify aircraft to carry a torpedo, although a lightweigt one, thnigs were more likely to be having some results. Since the state of capital ships in the Great War weas so that all were relatively vulnerable to underwater damage, except the German battleships, even a small 14 inch torpedo would b e serious enough to do serious damage on any Allied sort of capital ship.
 
The ships the Germans converted were IIRC during the war, and were to seaplane carriers (ie you had to winch the things in and out). The British had the only functional flat-top, Ark Royal in 1914 (Gods my memory is a bit out, but I'm pretty sure of the general idea here)

Seaplanes could be bigger than their land-based counterparts at this time, IIRC, and had the IDEA of dropping meaningful bombs, or launching torpedoes been there something might have been possible, but again IIRC both of these were developed during the war

1919 Britain was on the point of launching a carrier-borne attack against German naval installations, in that it had the plans in the works but of course the Armistice came along to prevent this.

German abilities would certainly have lagged behiiind those of the British

Best Regards
Grey Wolf
 
I believe that radios at that time were a bit too heavy for that.

Proposal: Zeppelins dropping bombs with chemical warheads on Scapa Flow.

The Zeppelins would face several problems.

Perhaps the biggest would be actually finding Scapa Flow. Navigation was by dead reckoning and in OTL, the Zeppelin force often bombed the wrong targets simply because they were led astray by high winds, fog/clouds, etc.

The second would be that they would be unable to carry sufficient weight of bombs to achieve a high enough concentration of chemical agents to make their attack effective. The whole reason why chemical weapons were effective on the Western Front was because through the use of massed attacks utilising artillery and projectors a high enough concentration of chemical agent could be achieved such that it would at worst kill and at least incapacitate its victims. The Zeppelins would not be able to achieve that sort of concentration, particularly against ships moored or moving and shooting back at them. They would require a direct hit on their targets in order for the agents to be effective and considering the state of bomb aiming at that time, you'd not have a hope in hell of achieving that consistently against a ship.
 
Thank you for responding. I know planes were not much in 1914 but, 1 250lb. bomb per plane might go thru the lesser turret armor. I thought all British ships were as open as the BCs. Strangely, I can not stomach the use of gas.
 
Thank you for responding. I know planes were not much in 1914 but, 1 250lb. bomb per plane might go thru the lesser turret armor. I thought all British ships were as open as the BCs. Strangely, I can not stomach the use of gas.


Free fall GP bombs of around the 250 lbs size, you mention are nor going to do much against even the slightest deck, or turretarmor at all, as it simply lacks both weight and momentum to break trhough even a thin sheet of hardened steel. When using a more modern divebomber, it perhaps can do so, but the fragile 1919-1918 aircraft are too weak and too slow to do this. As long as AP bombs are not developped, the GP, or HE ordinary bomb basically wil remain an anti personel weapon in the first place.

I believe it would be more logical to make use of the torpedo as a weapon of choice, as the Austrian airborne 14 inch Whitehead torpedo already was customised for use by floatplanes and could still do serious harm to all sorts of vessel, even the biggest ones. (No British ship was yet fitted with bulges and all lacked serious underwater protection, so the small 70 lbs warhead of the 500 lbs 14 inch torpedo could still cause serious damage, if hitting the target below the armored belt.)
 
Thank you for responding. I know planes were not much in 1914 but, 1 250lb. bomb per plane might go thru the lesser turret armor. I thought all British ships were as open as the BCs. Strangely, I can not stomach the use of gas.

The reaction of peoples to Chemical Weapons are funny. For people of those nations which experienced the full horrors of the Western Front and its use of Chemical Weapons, they are totally abhorrent. There is a national memory which exists of men blinded by blister agents, men's with lungs permanently damaged by Phosgene. For many Americans though, 'cause their nation arrived late and didn't suffer the same numbers of casualties and were only involved late in the war, Chemical Weapons are not viewed in the same way.
 
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