--- Dan Minette <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Right, but why do we only have aircraft carriers, > and not small boat > carriers for fleet vs. fleet operations? IMHO, its > because aircraft has a > different set of tradeoffs from boats/ships. I > cannot imagine a carrier > of, say PT boats being effective in fleet to fleet > operations. If they > were effective, wouldn't we have had at least one PT > carrier in a fleet? > > Dan M.
No, but it's not clear that WWI fleets wouldn't have evolved in that direction, with destroyers (which were, among other things, used to launch torpedo attacks on enemy fleets) possibly getting smaller/faster/more manueverable in order to increase their chance of getting to torpedo launching range. I think carriers might make sense, actually, but only if you assume the existence of a weapons technology with the ability to do a fairly high degree of damage at a very short range that can be carried by a small craft, and that such small craft have a significant ability to penetrate enemy defenses in order to deliver this weapon. Given that, then fighters might make sense - you'd want to use them to deploy that weapon at longer range than your onboard systems could deliver, and then you'd want fighters to defend against the other guys fighters...and then you're off to the races. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
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