On Mon, May 24, 2010 at 11:50:21AM +0200, Onno Meyer wrote: >Finally, submarine aircraft carriers have a nice pulp action >appeal. Is there a way to justify them?
I've run some of the numbers on this for my Crimson Skies campaign, and it's a real challenge - possibly why nobody has ever built a "big" sub-carrier. (I'm thinking here of something that can operate normal carrier-borne aircraft of the era, carrying say 12 or 24 of them.) (In case you don't know it, Crimson Skies is basically WWII technology in a pulp 1937; there are rumours of superscience developments, but nothing concrete in canon. In the first computer game, the British Empire is seen to be operating a submersible carrier. Canonicity of that is dubious, but only people like me care about this.) The basic problem at this tech level is that you can't do a full deck strike without becoming just another surface carrier for the duration. Enclosing the entirety of the flight deck with pressure-tight doors, while still making flight operations viable when they're open, isn't going to be possible. This means that if there's any risk of needing to submerge you can fly off (and recover) aircraft only as fast as the lifts will shift them between hangar and deck. Also: the primary defence of a submarine is not being found, and the secondary is water as armour. Well, the enemy can follow your aircraft back to find you... and while you're conducting flight ops, you kind of have to be on the surface. While you're fighting on the surface, you have the disadvantage of being a submarine (hull shape, extra machinery that's dead weight while you're surfaced). Oh, and you can't exactly have escorts. Unless you're going to build a dedicated anti-aircraft submarine... This means that the sub-carrier can't do most of the jobs that a surface carrier can do. What can it do? The only thing that comes to my mind is sneak attacks: send its planes to bomb somewhere, and either recover them to a land-based field or a surface carrier (which could in itself be useful, giving a big range advantage if the attacker is closer to the target than a surface carrier could get without being attacked) or hope that no significant number of enemy aircraft will survive to follow them back. As a submarine, it's _huge_. (A Casablanca escort carrier, with 28 aircraft, is 10K dtons full load; a Gato-class sub is 1500 on the surface, 2400 submerged.) This has implications for the range at which its diesels can be heard. There are some practical design considerations (the lift(s) have to pierce the pressure hull) but I think it's the lack of tactical and operational role that's the real killer to this concept. Roger _______________________________________________ GurpsNet-L mailing list <[email protected]> http://mail.sjgames.com/mailman/listinfo/gurpsnet-l
