Re: OT: WWII carriers, was:FTFB- After Action Report/Newbie questions

Mikko Kurki-Suonio wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
> 
> > Recent thread on the Starfire mailing list :-/ They quoted Jane's as
well
> > (or claimed to), but the figures were a wee bit higher than 6".
Can't
> > vouch for their validity since I don't have either Jane's or
Conway's,
> > unfortunately :-(
> 
> The roots of this may be in the pre-war naval treaties. In those
times,
> they chose to limit the number of capital ships. Carriers, however,
were
> given no tonnage limit and all this resulted in Lexington, Saratoga,
Akagi
> and Kaga being built on converted incomplete battleship and -cruiser
> hulls.
> 
> Which, in turn, resulted in idiocies like 8" guns on the ships
mentioned,
> and the 10"-ish armour belts on Akagi and Kaga. The Saratoga class 6"
> belt may have been thicker in places, I'm unable to confirm right now.
> 
> Heavy, ofcourse, is relative. 2"-6" armour is on par with CA armour of
the
> era.
> 
> Later war experiences clearly proved that carriers had no use for the
> heavy guns, and the armour they really needed was deck and torpedo
> protection, not conventional armour belt (which is above waterline).
> 
> Getting caught in range of enemy surface ships was result of
incredibly
> bad luck, and happened only on a couple of occasion during the war
(Leyte
> and Scharnhorst & Gneisenau plugging the oddly planeless Glorious off
> the coast of Norway).
> 
> Things in FT are a bit different, as the ships are actually faster
than
> the fighters...
> 
	There's a very good discussion of this in a book entitled 
"The Hybrid warship"  It seems that for a while the Navy was playing
around with making CLV's  (cruiser carriers,) carrying anything from 3
to 9 6-inch cannon, with up to 30 planes in a angled deck.  Actually, it
looked rather like a WWII version of a Kiev.
	It failed for two reasons--
	1.  As above, wargames using the Lex, proved that a carrier
getting
within 8 inch, or 6 inch cannon range of regular warships was a death
sentence, and that being the case all the guns did was take away from
aircraft capacity.
	2.  Plane size, and wing loading was going up so fast that the
projected cruisers could barely handle the existing aircraft when they
were designed.	They never would have been able to handle the frontline
navy aircraft in 1940-41, even with catapults.	
	All in all, the carrier/cruiser deal seemed to be an attempt by
the
navy to sneak more carriers past the various treaties, not to mention
congress.  Another thing that killed it was that some were afraid that
congress might decide to count CLV tonnage against the total permissable
carrier tonnage.  The author concludes that had the ships been built,
the first thing that would have happened in WWII would have been the
removal of the gun turrets and the ships conversion into full carriers.
	Off topic:  Has anyone seen Echoes of Honor by David Weber?  I
won't
give away any plots but his "fighters" are about 20,000 tons apeice,
which in all honesty is probably closer to the mark the X-wings or
Starfuries.