WI - Japanese CVs obsessed with damage control?

Delta Force

Banned
There's also the Fourth Fleet Incident shortly after the Tomozuro capsizing, in which the Imperial Japanese Navy's Fourth Fleet encountered a typhoon that ripped the bows off destroyers, seriously cracked the hulls of cruisers, and badly damaged the flight decks and superstructure of the light aircraft carriers. Tomozuro was in 1934, the Fourth Fleet Incident was in 1935.
 
To achieve the WI, the POD would need to occur before 1900, certainly before the Japanese-Russian War. Of course a cultural change of this magnitude would be enough to butterfly away most of Japan's history until 1950.

Losing the Russo-Japanese War might be enough to change the culture. Tsushima engraved the cult of the "Decisive Battle", so if that cult was destroyed, then military culture would likely change. This obviously does not take into consideration the traumatic shock the loss would inflict on Japan.


Also, Ryujo actually was the aircraft carrier found to suffer from a high center of gravity and poor stability, so not only did the Japanese try to sneak around the treaties, they also didn't manage to produce a workable ship from doing so.

I think Ryujo's issues were because the London Treaty blocked the loopholes Ryujo was supposed to exploit, so they changed the design from the original one deck to two decks.
 
I've been thinking of posting a similar question for a long time. My idea is that sometime during the 1930s, a Chinese plane successfully bombs an IJN carrier. This would mean having Chinese aircraft based somewhere within range of where the carrier is, and at least one plane finding the carrier. The carrier (Hosho, Kaga, Akag, maybe another) suffers a lot of damage, but survives. The IJN, having now experienced a real attack on a carrier, and real battle damage, has some officers giving serious thought to making carriers more survivable.

Before WW-2, did anyone's aircraft carriers suffer bad damage? There would have been plenty of planes crashing on decks. What about bad fires, or explosions? Before the war, did any navy have real experience with what could happen aboard a carrier?
 
The Japanese military had a very different mindset toward personnel and equipment than the other players in the Pacific War (at least until the very end when the Red Army joined the fray). The Imperial Japanese command structure saw personnel and even vessels as expendable items.
This makes me wonder what the crew quarters, including for officers was like on the large IJN ships.

Here's Bismarck's crew quarters https://www.bismarck-class.dk/bismarck/crew/bismarck_crew.html

Here's Italian battleship Roma's crew quarters http://i.imgur.com/ZEHslWK.jpg

ZEHslWK.jpg
 

CalBear

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This makes me wonder what the crew quarters, including for officers was like on the large IJN ships.

Here's Bismarck's crew quarters https://www.bismarck-class.dk/bismarck/crew/bismarck_crew.html

Here's Italian battleship Roma's crew quarters http://i.imgur.com/ZEHslWK.jpg

ZEHslWK.jpg
These aren't for the "crew". These are, at the minimum, the CO's quarters, although I would speculate that it is the flag spaces. Warship space is at a premium, even in the USN (which had/has a well deserved reputation for crew "luxuries", including an "emergency" replacement for the ice-cream freezer when Yorktown returned from Coral Sea). Enlisted bunks tend to be spartan at best, with "hot bunking being fairly common, especially during wartime when crews expanded.
 
The Japanese actually converted the third Yamato class battleship, Shinano, into an aircraft carrier. It even retained the heavy armor.
True, however the Shinano was not going to be a real/fleet carrier but rather a transport carrier with a limited air group primarily for self protection. Only parts of the ship retained the armor it would have had if it had been completed as a battleship. It is hard to say if the many design flaws that the Shinano had as a carrier would have been there had it had been completed as a battleship but it seems likely at least some would have been there.

It seems that if you start the conversion process early enough you can take a "non-carrier" hull and make it in to a useful carrier like Lexington and Saratoga, or even the merchant hulls that were made in to CVEs. In those cases the compromises were acceptable. I don't think that if you had taken an Iowa class BB and begun converting it when it was as far along as the Shinano was you would have ended up with a good result.

IMHO if you fully armored a carrier like a battleship, not only part way like was done with the Shinano, you'd have stability issues with too much weight too high up, and issues with available internal space for an adequate hanger deck etc. Once you have the sort of power you get with nuclear power, weight issues for speed are not as bad, but still you might have stability issues.
 
Having multiple 1000lb armor piercing bombs go off in your engineering spaces will do a lot of damage.And require a lot of time and resources to repair.The question is what doesn't get built or repaired while the carriers atr being fixed.
 
These aren't for the "crew". These are, at the minimum, the CO's quarters, although I would speculate that it is the flag spaces. Warship space is at a premium, even in the USN (which had/has a well deserved reputation for crew "luxuries", including an "emergency" replacement for the ice-cream freezer when Yorktown returned from Coral Sea). Enlisted bunks tend to be spartan at best, with "hot bunking being fairly common, especially during wartime when crews expanded.
Interestingly, we rarely see any pics of the interior of Japanese carriers, either the hangars or especially the accommodation spaces.

Here's the interior of Hosho, converted to personnel transport, presumably through an American lens.

g351905.jpg


I'd love to know what the IJN carriers interiors were like.
 

trurle

Banned
Several comments were made on inter-war Japanese faulty command structure preventing proper fire response. Also, comments were made about carrier usage doctrine flaws. Although i believe the both problems are solvable if proper historical trigger is available (for example, proposed bad incident with Hosho in 1923) i must point out what other world navies are not prevented from taking the same lessons as Japanese. Information security in inter-war Japan was pretty low, so any Japanese doctrine or construction finding would be readily copied, making not much overall difference in the flow of WWII.

What may help Japanese only is some radically insane (and dismissed as such by most other countries) but yet workable approach. The obvious improvements like better ventilation or fire training are not going to shift the balance.
Therefore, some higher-impact proposals related to Japanese carriers fire resistance:
1)Trimaran carrier with all avgas stored in outer floats. This design allows some resistance to fire and torpedo hits, plus wide, less crowded (and less prone to explosion cascade or fire spread) aircraft deck - at the expense of weight, cost and speed.
2)Decision to go with on-ship fueling trucks/railcars instead of long fuel hoses and pipes. Again, bad solution due weight, maintenance and service issues during heavy seas, but safer against fire as burning vehicles do not promote fire spread as readily as hoses.
3)Any decision to avoid carriers with dedicated hangar deck. IOTL, these affected adversely not only carriers survivability, but also an aircraft R&D due added size constraints. WWII history showed what in weather demanding hangar deck (rain or snow) aircraft utility is reduced anyway to the point of carrier being better to be withdrawn (at least before invention of radar). This point was not obvious during interwar epoch of rapidly evolving aircraft designs though, so everybody was concerned with all-weather carrier designs.
4)Anything else?
 
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1)Trimaran carrier with all avgas stored in outer floats. This design allows some resistance to fire and torpedo hits, plus wide, less crowded (and less prone to explosion cascade or fire spread) aircraft deck - at the expense of weight, cost and speed.
2)Decision to go with on-ship fueling trucks/railcars instead of long fuel hoses and pipes. Again, bad solution due weight, maintenance and service issues during heavy seas, but safer against fire as burning vehicles do not promote fire spread as readily as hoses.
3)Any decision to avoid carriers with dedicated hangar deck. IOTL, these affected adversely not only carriers survivability, but also an aircraft R&D due added size constraints. WWII history showed what in weather demanding hangar deck (rain or snow) aircraft utility is reduced anyway to the point of carrier being better to be withdrawn (at least before invention of radar). This point was not obvious during interwar epoch of rapidly evolving aircraft designs though, so everybody was concerned with all-weather carrier designs.
1- Try calculating a design like that without computers..... not to mention building it even now nobody has gone to exotic ship designs for major capital warships.

2- Might be worth thinking about just how much Avgas a full strike needs in terms of fuel if will need a lot of tankers.. (USS Essex had ‎231,650 Gallons about 650t worth just in fuel)

3- Without a hangar your entire strike wing would be unusable within a month just from lack of maintenance.
 
One thing I remember from reading SHATTERED SWORD was a comment about the CO2 suppression system on KAGA. It was decided to put in a second compressor as a backup but there was no internal space to fit it. So an external platform was added underneath one of the 5-inch AA Battery sponsons and it was put there.

One of the first bombs to hit KAGA hit the edge of the deck and took out not only the 5-inch guns but the CO2 compressor as well. So just when it was desperately needed it was on the way to the bottom of the Pacific...
 

trurle

Banned
1- Try calculating a design like that without computers..... not to mention building it even now nobody has gone to exotic ship designs for major capital warships.

2- Might be worth thinking about just how much Avgas a full strike needs in terms of fuel if will need a lot of tankers.. (USS Essex had ‎231,650 Gallons about 650t worth just in fuel)

3- Without a hangar your entire strike wing would be unusable within a month just from lack of maintenance.
Yes, what`s why i label these (trimaran hull, fueling trucks and hangarless carrier) solutions as insane. These can work if all conditions are right, but looks flawed enough so no foreign power would copy it. Not before extensive proof-by-battle. Specifically for hangar-less carrier, these could be built in anticipation of the very high loss rate for the air wings or rampaging US submarines, something Japanese did not predict. Historically small hangar-less MAC carriers built by British showed good performance as ASW ships, despite maintenance issues. I suspect maintenance issues would be even smaller for larger hangar-less carriers (due higher freeboard).
 
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