The Deutschland Class Revolution

Hood wrote:

I feel moved to offer a response to Tobious' points, I don't want to derail this thread so I'll try and be brief.

The FAA did order some good aircraft, Hawker Osprey, Fairey IIIF etc. and some bad during the 1920s, so did the RAF. Notably not much new equipment was forthcoming during the early 30s due to budgets. Remember the carrier fleet was small, hangar capacity as you admit was low and therefore there was little justification to persuade the Treasury to refund continual development and fielding of new aircraft when the force was quite small.

Agreed.

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American carriers were not always big, Ranger was small and so was Wasp, intentionally designed as a smaller Yorktown due to Treaty restrictions. Although Lexington and Saratoga were big, they were battlecruiser conversions and not designed from scratch. Had the US been forced to design from the keel up I doubt the result would have been the same.

I covered the Lexington above. The Americans essentially followed British practice as they understood it for their Washington treaty carriers. The Langley lessons weren't completely understood until after 1927. It was Langley where they u-turned to the open hanger. As for the undersized 'fleet' carriers, there were also the Princetons, and the Americans paid bitterly for all those mistakes.

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It is true the hangar used in the strictest sense of the word did affect RN capacity and encouraged the creation of HMS Unicorn, a dedicated aircraft repair and resupply ship to free hangar space on the carriers and to offer a means to offset the high accident damage and attrition rates of the era. It was an expensive luxury, but the logic was sound.

The Americans used surplus to need CVE's the same way.

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Your lists of armoured carrier losses "after one internal hit" is simply not credible. Taiho and Shinano were sunk by multiple torpedo hits and poor damage control, HMS Glorious was sunk by battlecruiser gunfire, HMS Eagle, Courageous and Ark Royal also by torpedoes. True, Ark Royal's design flaws sank the ship but I think DK Brown did a pretty good analysis of that. US carriers never gunnery attack from warships and they did not experience the same kinds of underwater damage the RN did. The articles by Stuart Slade and Richard Worth are good but overlooks that Kamikazes were topside impact weapons. They could hit the sides and decks of the ship and causes fires and shrapnel damage but they could not hole below the waterline - that is how you sink ships, by letting water in unless you can touch off enough ammo and fuel to do the job from the inside. No armoured carrier ever blew up or sank from bomb hits or Kamikazes.

Internal hit means internal hit. I did not specify torpedo, bomb, or shell. In each case cited, one internal hit either among planes in the hanger or to the Avgas storage and handling facilities killed that ship as the investigations concluded, the rest of the damage was pure gravy on a burned steak-especially Taiho and Shinano. Akagi bombed by Lt. English at Midway is the practical example. It only took one bomb total.

Every US carrier lost not due to gunfire, or kamikaze was due to torpedoes, except the USS Princeton which took a Judy's bomb that set off her magazines. And even then USS Reno scuttled her with torpedoes.

USS Gambier Bay off Samar. Failed scuttle of USS Hornet. Those were gunfire incidents. In the end it was cruisers and the Haruna that is believed killed the Gambier Bay.

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The main problem is land-based air power. The USN never really went up against thousands of land-based planes in massed attacks with mixed dive-bomber and torpedo bomber formations and covered by world-leading fighters. It faced IJN carrier attacks of a few hundred aircraft in a few waves in the early years or hundreds of one-way Kamikazes using obsolete aircraft. Britain faced that kind of threat in the North Sea and in the Med, in aeronautical terms its bases were practically next door and no air superiority could be guaranteed but the FAA also knew it had RAF support to defend its bases and project its power beyond coastal waters (the first RAF raids of the war were against German harbours). Build more fighters and put them in more Ark Royals you say, the choice is allocating rearmament resources for aircraft production for home-defence fighters or for the navy. Option A is always going to win that political argument.

Okinawa. You pointed this out yourself. Cruise missiles circa 1945. And USS Savannah and co. off Salerno.

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2 & 3 & 4. The Skua had potential and showed it at times. It could dive-bomb well and intercept bombers. However faced against land-based Bf-109s the Skua was no fighter and with only one 500lb bomb (British AP bombs were rubbish in the early war) it lacked real striking power against bigger ships. The Roc was a disaster but 'it seemed a good idea at the time'.

Agreed. Not arguing against facts. Beefing up the horsepower in a proven airframe could have yielded better results. Did not know the early British 240kg SAP was rubbish. Might explain the "Channel Dash".

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I don't think the Skua/Roc could easily take a Hercules, its wider and longer and heavier so you would need to restore the c.g. etc. and you'd end up with something much bigger and heavier. Krakatoa's Gloster is entirely AU so its impossible to say its too narrow if it was designed to take a Hercules from the start.

a. Skua/Roc Bristol Perseus-> mount diameter 55.3 inches (141.0 cm) length 125 cm. mass 470 kg.
b. Skua/Roc Bristol Hercules-> mount diameter 55 inches (140.0 cm) length 135 cm. mass 875 kg. that extra 900 pounds (408 kgs) either needs a three foot extension of the tail or it needs 300 pounds ballast aft of the radio (an additional fuel tank?), and spring actuated ailerons to apply down force in tail control, either or all of the above. One meter longer and 1200 lbs makes that much of a difference? Look at the Gloster Gladiator and how it was modified.
b. You can tell the fareback from cowl to main barrel circle is very wrong in his Gloster Griffon. He followed the F5/34 silhouette too closely.

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5. AU is hand-waving to a certain extent, its exploring other avenues and producing cool but realistic ship designs.

Then you can't put FIDO type rocket boosted torpedoes on a 1938 era British destroyer's forecastle. It will sink bow first the first time one of those RATs explodes in the rack.

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6a. I tend to agree although the Hercules was a good engine and perhaps the RR Exe could have been useful too.

Agreed.

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6b. In certain elements I'd agree in regards to construction but Grumman was still building biplane fighters in the late 1930s (the Wildcat still had manual pump undercarriage retraction!) and Douglas and Boeing were making far more money in making airliners than military stuff. Notably not many of the late 1930s USN aircraft had lives beyond 1942 and the few sent to Britain were often rejected as unsuited to European conditions. America was good at carrying heavy payloads over long distances economically and reliably because that was its home market and why radials made more sense. "And forget about propellers and guns", really? Never heard of Rotol, Fairey-Reed and de Havilland Propellers? Britain brought Brownings (.303in was too small but in the late 30s it looked enough to do the job) and Hispano cannon too (also Brownings were built by FN in Liege too.)

Wildcat and Dauntless served the war, a fact few people remember. Buffaloes were deathtraps, the land-based Warhawk seems to have served as did the A-20 Havoc, but anything in the pursuit series from P-35 to P-38 the British rejected.

I've heard of Rotol. Not impressed. Spitfire and Hurricane had nothing like the propellers used on the Wildcat and the Dauntless. Rotol didn't even mount a decent three blade variable pitch on the Spitfire until long after the BoB. Before then it was a constant pitch Rotol or de Haviland, and before that a two piece wooden prop! (first 150 produced.). I believe Hawker quickly found a decent Rotol for the Hurricane, so it's not as if the British didn't have a capability to design. It just was not there at the time.

Special mention should be made about the Belgian Browning 13 mm. It wasn't very good. (feed jams) That's a 40 kg gun in mass and is large (almost as large as the HS404.) and a gun that notoriously didn't work. Britain had the license to build the Browning .303 (which did work as long as you kept it heated) left over from after WW I. I don't know what the licensing problems for the .50 were, but Britain could not obtain the licensing for the .50 from the United States (Browning's heirs) which had licensed FN to build that gun sometime around 1930. Britain (Vickers) designed their own .50 cal which never took off; but it all sort of became academic anyway as soon as Britain and the US decided around 1938 that the 20 mm auto-cannon was the proper weapon for an interceptor fighter. The British and French made arrangements to exchange the Hispano Suisse HS 404 for some British tech I don't remember. The US wanted that gun too, but the French weren't selling and the Americans had to wait for the British to give them a loaner to reverse engineer. The Yanks screwed it up. So the Americans were stuck with the Brownings and the British went to the cannons. I don't know why any AU artist worth his salt would want the .50 for an illustrated naval fighter when he can have the historical Hispano in the same weight class, feed arrangement and wing he draws?

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6c. Meh, how many navies had decent AA fire control in 1939? I've heard too many arguments about medium calibre AA guns to care. I'm not sure it really made that much difference.

The USN apparently did. It didn't change its 1939 particulars much until after Pearl Harbor. Their antiaircraft fire as described by the Japanese who had the ineffective British with whom to compare at the time was "unbelievably murderous". 29 planes splashed is not trivial in that event, when fighter opposition was practically nonexistent and the main weapons used were 3' AAA, 5'AAA and 12.7 mm Brownings.

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6d. It's 1939 and everyone in the Admiralty thinks ASDIC will easily sort out the U-boats. Also Germany hasn't got hundreds of the in 1937 or 1939, even 1940. The fact many ASW escort types were produced in this AU onwards suggests otherwise really.

Agreed. But then why are we suggesting impossible or wankish things in the art then. (See my comment about impossible rocket boosted torpedoes from another thread.) Verisimilitude in AU art requires some grounding in what's possible, doesn't it? You can't stuff a Mark 7 12/45 USN naval rifle barbette dual mount on a Brooklyn type hull without bulging the midbody from first barbette well back and shortening that magazine well, can you?

Shipbucket

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