> On Thu, 17 Sep 1998, Oerjan Ohlson wrote:
> Recent thread on the Starfire mailing list :-/ They quoted Jane's as
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...
> Mikko Kurki-Suonio wrote:
Can't
> > vouch for their validity since I don't have either Jane's or
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.
> Mikko Kurki-Suonio wrote:
snip...JTL
> Getting caught in range of enemy surface ships was result of
The Glorious was not pladeless, in fact it had the opposite
problem, far too many planes on the deck. It had been recovering
hurricanes from Norway and had no space to load or launch its normal
aircraft. (It also had no time, but that is a different problem.)
Bye for now,
> Charles Gray wrote:
> Off topic: Has anyone seen Echoes of Honor by David Weber? I
These sound very much like the non-FTL capable LACs described elsewhere
in the HH series. Is there any difference between the EoH LACs and the ones in
(eg) Honor Among Enemies?
> On Fri, 18 Sep 1998, John and Roxanne Leary wrote:
> The Glorious was not pladeless, in fact it had the opposite
Interesting... what's your source? Mine could easily be wrong.
In any case, the net effect is the same -- Glorious was unable to
launch aircraft against the Germans.