Curiousone
Banned
You beat me to it. I was going to joke about a Midway where each side sank all of each others aircraft carriers.
less airpower
- Thread starter Ravenflight
- Start date
You beat me to it. I was going to joke about a Midway where each side sank all of each others aircraft carriers.
Hmm –do you think it’s a good idea to advertise that you’re even slower-thinking than I am? (You can make me laugh every Sunday by telling a joke on the Thursday).
For consideration: if there are heavy carrier losses on both sides early on in the Pacific, would each side build so many as replacements? After all, they’ve just demonstrated that the enormous investments in men and material made by both sides have demonstrated an ability to do no more than attack and sink each other.
If significant advocates of naval air power such as Halsey, Genda and Fuchida are killed, then you could have a resurgence of black shoe navy predominance.
In the USN, you could have possible Tone-class conversions of a couple of Clevelands on the stocks: the IJN may start using more Rufes on ships (I think they were catapult-capable), and the USN may extend its experiment with floatplane F4s, although a Wildcat with boots wouldn’t catch much.
Alternatively, a short-term return to the Grand Fleet’s one-shot fighters, cf the CAM ships: after all you’d want some method of killing enemy recon.
If, as I suggested earlier, the LR air requirements in the Pacific impact on the ETO buildup of the 8th and 15th, then the Luftwaffe gets a breathing space that they probably won’t recognise in temporary – not with Fatso and Jeschonnek in charge.
So: more resources for tactical aircraft for the east, and/or more for elsewhere – if they can concentrate against the night offensive, it may become too expensive for the RAF to continue, a sort of night equivalent of the USAAF’s decisions in October 1943.
Most likely, though, they’d just retreat into complacency – it’s Goering and Jeschonnek, remember.
Except that the USN had an unsinkable (but also immobile) carrier, plus a number of CVLs and CVEs both in service and in construction, so the USN wouldn't have been without for long.
Pearl Harbor eliminates this possibility. Plus their value to amphibious operations is too great if only to provide ground support.
I am not sure having "fair" tests does the trick. Once people get a vision of potential things happen. It matters less about what they see specifically at the time.
Get rid of the Washington Naval Treaty. Once that in place, everyone cheated by building aircraft carriers from cruiser hulls. Get rid of that and everyone builds more battleships at the expense of carriers.
I'm notoriously bad at spotting jokes, especially on the internet.
that'll help, but Britain and Japan already have the bit between their teeth in regards to carriers.
Not very, because you've basically just run up a big signal saying "here I am, please shoot me".
Another problem would be that surface naval combat was still mobile, and I feel that airships would be too vulnerable to weather and take too long to inflate to be effective. I may be wrong.
You may well be right. Plus any non helium airships could get blown up by sparks from the exhaust from smoke stacks.
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There were naval patrol airships all during ww1, how did they operated with the fleet?
I was thinking non seaplane recon. If they are allowed then it could depend on what ocean you have your ships stationed in.
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I was thinking non seaplane recon, too. Airships=blimps or rigid dirigibles. In the 1950s the USN blimps developed techniques for refueling and resupply without tower or physical landing on surface ships.
With less planes for recon might those developments be speeded up to 1930 or so? Or would that be pushing things?
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No telling really. All it might really take is encouragement by an admiral (for example) for a consistant search for better/practical ways of doing things by his ship and airship crews.
I must admit, this isn't the direction I was thinking of with the 'less airpower' thread when I started it. That said, I really really like airships.
As an aside, I've longed for the return of the airship. I've always thought that it would be a wonderful mix of speedy airtravel and luxury liner travel. Separate accomodation, walks along the promonade, swiming pools, all that sort of thing. I can't see how it couldn't be done... I'm not even sure why it HASN'T been done by some wealthy entrepreneur. I know of the various plans etc, but I've heard of plans ever since I thought of it myself as a youth and still nothing has come of it... which saddens me somewhat.
So the idea of having airships dominate because of a reduction in airpower is something I do like.
I don't think we've really addressed the reasons for the reduction in airpower though.
Airships came to a crashing halt (pardon the pun) because of the Hindenburg in 1937, but by that time the Supermarine Spitfire had made its first flight and the Douglas SBD Dauntless was well and truly on its way. So whilst the reduction in airpower may have increased the use of the airship, I don't think the loss of the airship changed airpower overly. Indeed, even the Hindenburg disaster didn't stop airships. The US had several airships going during WWII.
I like MattII's idea of the delay or elimination of aluminium refining by halting the development of the Hall–Héroult process as mentioned in post #8. The only problem with Matt's idea (that I can see) is that even if we did kill Hall and Héroult off, I still think someone else would have come up with the technology. Similar to the light bulb... without Swan or Edison, someone else would have come up with the technology. We may be able to delay this somewhat. Even a delay in 10 years would have fairly substantial knock on effects.
Jukra's ideas in post #16 are well received by me, but I think we have to go earlier.
I think we need to (merging some ideas from above):
Get rid of Hall and Héroult, making aircraft heavier. The Eagle VIII used in the Handley Page V/1500 used a lot of aluminium, but that might possibly only mean that the payload was less (it already carried 3 tonnes of payload, so bringing that down to 2 is still a lot of gas bombs for Jukra's gas bombing raid in 1919).
Improve anti-aircraft technology as given in Jukra's post.
I think these two things would change the direction of aircraft production.
IMHO cheap aluminium production would be well and truly available (by use of the MattII-Ravenflight process invented in 1908 (that's a joke MattII - just in case you miss it
) by WWII, but it would still be an expensive material, too expensive to waste on such things as aircraft that aren't going to be any use anyway!Hmm. More refining of this required, but it's going somewhere I think...