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Glorious Arstotzka

17 (16%)

Glorious Moskurg

13 (12.3%)

Ingloriously Didn't Play

76 (71.7%)

Total Members Voted: 106

[Kot]

The problem with the airship carrier is that:
a) You can't really have a lot of them, which limits your amount of places to land at. With seaplanes, water is our landing strip and there's a lot of water, I assure you.
Also, the bigger they are, the more it hurts when they fall.
b) Easily detectable, even more than regular carriers.
c) Limits on size, weight and amount of planes it can carry.
d) It's a fucking airship, while yeah, historically they actually weren't that easy to take down, I can see many good ideas (flying torpedoes that penetrate through whole length of the ship, "A-Winging the cabin", etc.) that could easily take them down.

The goal is to skip the age of heavy-weight battleship slugfests and jump straight to a more modern concept of carriers and destroyer escorts.

We'd have to spend next few turns on the navy, since we have literally no experience. Meanwhile, we have experience with planes, which I think will take much less designs and revisions to get around to be good. The goal is to skip the need of actually having a navy completly.

I suggest that (after designing a destroyer), we try for a floatplane, with retractable floats, to serve as a dedicated torpedo bomber. If it goes well, we can design more floatplanes, perhaps bypassing the need for carriers altogether.

While a floatplane (or, more accurately for what we are trying to design, a flying boat), is nice, I don't think it's very suitable as our main torpedo bomber. That's mostly because a both flying boats and float planes are by design slower and less manoeuvrable (and also bigger, ergo more vulnerable) than conventional planes.

The main part of flying boats being slower and less agile is that you have to put engines in less than favourable positions, which kinda necessities them to be big. Also, because they also have to be a ship at the same time. The main part of float planes being slower and less agile is that to have engines in favourable position, you need to have static floats sticking out of the bottom which create a lot of drag.
Retractable floats solve that problem.

Also note that old-timey article: "ten planes". Even the crappiest of carriers in this period carried 20-25, Japanese fleet carriers had 50+ planes, and the attack on Pearl Harbor involved 400+. I dunno how we're going to build 40 of those things, or five of them for one carrier.

Float planes also solve that. You can have 400+ planes easily just hang around an atoll or something, with way more of them launching at one time than from aircraft carriers.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

By making a carrier, we can use already existing planes, rather than needing to make a ton of new designs.  From an economy of actions view, the carrier is by far more efficient.

By making a carrier we also need to design whole navy. Carrier on it's own is not going to be very helpful, and I doubt you could design whole working navy with less designs and revisions than you could design a retractable floats and revise current planes to adopt them.

Not really.  All we really need to make are escorts, which are necessary for our existing transports anyway.

Granted, the floating transport aircraft could have a use if we use them to paradrop troops to secure zones, then use them to bring in heavier equipment.  If we combine it with gliders we can use to land armored cars, motorbikes, and heavy weapons during the initial invasions, we may have a decent invasion force.  Possibly a bit more versatile, since we could invade anywhere rather than sticking to beaches like they would need to (ex. Island surrounded by rocks preventing boats from landing?  Parachute soldiers in and have a couple gliders to get in supplies to build a runway.  Presto, a really hard to capture air base, and hard to destroy once we bring in AA guns.)

[Kot]

Not really.  All we really need to make are escorts, which are necessary for our existing transports anyway.

I also hope we will nail making two complicated naval vessels without any prior knowledge on how to do that.

[MidnightJaguar]

So while I agree that having Seaplane would be incrediblly useful. I also agree that having any destroyer, even a very shifty one would probably be more useful right now, if only because it prevents the enemy from having complete control over an entire theater for at least a turn. I think that having a destroyer would give us some breathing room and flexibility of doctrine while we figure out what to do next.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Not really.  All we really need to make are escorts, which are necessary for our existing transports anyway.

I also hope we will nail making two complicated naval vessels without any prior knowledge on how to do that.

Well, we aren't completely without knowledge of how to make ships thanks to the Arstotzkan Cargoship.  At very worst we would get it in the 'Hard' category, and the torpedo didn't come out too bad even with rolling a 2.

[Mulisa]

Assuming this is a vote. I'll cast my lot with the Destroyer. We need the naval experience, and the protection for our convoys.

Speaking of convoys, given tha we're fighting a for that possesses naval superiority, should we focus our fleet similarly to Germany; U-boats, pocket battleships, general convoy raiding shenanigans?

[evictedSaint]

At the very worst we slap a couple torpedo tubes and an artillery battery on the cargoship and call it a destroyer.  We could also just chop-top a cargoship and put in a flight deck, too

[Taricus]

We have even better convoy raiders: Aircraft.

[Mulisa]

At the very worst we slap a couple torpedo tubes and an artillery battery on the cargoship and call it a destroyer.  We could also just chop-top a cargoship and put in a flight deck, too

Well, that is what the first aircraft carriers were.

I wonder if that'd count as a revise action.

[Zanzetkuken The Great]

Assuming this is a vote. I'll cast my lot with the Destroyer. We need the naval experience, and the protection for our convoys.

Speaking of convoys, given tha we're fighting a for that possesses naval superiority, should we focus our fleet similarly to Germany; U-boats, pocket battleships, general convoy raiding shenanigans?

I say steal Germany's U-boat doctrine, but combined with America's carrier doctrine.

Hang on, just had a thought.  Could we revise our torpedoes to use rocket propulsion to get missiles we arm our bombers with, to hit the side of their ships above the torpedo defenses?

Edit: And from there, develop rocket artillery?

[Khan Boyzitbig]

At the very worst we slap a couple torpedo tubes and an artillery battery on the cargoship and call it a destroyer.  We could also just chop-top a cargoship and put in a flight deck, too

The first part is a feasible Q ship, the latter would need a catapult and other features (our cargo ships are small at only 60m long while a CVL or CVE usually was much larger as in about double that length) or it wouldn't work.

[Taricus]

We may as well invent proper rockets in that case ten Zan, no point in using the torpedo for such. Besides, Cannalan ships don't pack torpedo defenses.

[Azzuro]

At the very worst we slap a couple torpedo tubes and an artillery battery on the cargoship and call it a destroyer.  We could also just chop-top a cargoship and put in a flight deck, too

Well, that is what the first aircraft carriers were.

I wonder if that'd count as a revise action.

I highly highly doubt it, and if it worked it'd probably be a pretty crappy proof-of-concept carrier. Best to spend a design on it if it's going to be the centrepiece of our naval strategy.

And navy-wise, I'm agreeing with evictedSaint here. Only carriers and destroyers, no big guns at all. Destroyers to eventually have sonar+torpedo for anti-submarine and AA guns everywhere, while carriers have the radar and Sky Cancer^TM their way to victory. If we're going full-on foreknowledge, don't invest even the slightest bit of work in Big Guns when air-dropped bombs will outperform them in range in short order. No subs either, when our carriers can double in the interdiction role if not facing off against enemy carriers and battleships.

[Mulisa]

Assuming this is a vote. I'll cast my lot with the Destroyer. We need the naval experience, and the protection for our convoys.

Speaking of convoys, given tha we're fighting a for that possesses naval superiority, should we focus our fleet similarly to Germany; U-boats, pocket battleships, general convoy raiding shenanigans?

I say steal Germany's U-boat doctrine, but combined with America's carrier doctrine.

Hang on, just had a thought.  Could we revise our torpedoes to use rocket propulsion to get missiles we arm our bombers with, to hit the side of their ships above the torpedo defenses?

Edit: And from there, develop rocket artillery?

I'm guessing turning a torpedo into a rocket is beyond the scope of a revision. Doubly if you actually meant a missile and not a rocket. As for the torpedo defenses, couldn't we just spend the revision on perfecting the magnetic detonator, so the torpedoes would rip the ship apart from below the torpedo protection?

[Kot]

Assuming this is a vote. I'll cast my lot with the Destroyer. We need the naval experience, and the protection for our convoys.

Don't vote yet. We don't know how badly we're fucked, the turn is not out yet.

At the very worst we slap a couple torpedo tubes and an artillery battery on the cargoship and call it a destroyer.  We could also just chop-top a cargoship and put in a flight deck, too

Slap the guns, torpedo tubes and a plane catapult or two. We have the rockets, catapult itself is just a long stripe of metal, and since our fighter planes should be cheap we could always just ditch them in sea. That's what Brits did for convoy defence when they were lacking aircraft carriers.

We have even better convoy raiders: Aircraft.

Floatplanes...

Hang on, just had a thought.  Could we revise our torpedoes to use rocket propulsion to get missiles we arm our bombers with, to hit the side of their ships above the torpedo defenses?

Edit: And from there, develop rocket artillery?

So when I propose interesting stuff based on real designs that worked, it's shoot down because it's retarded, but when others do it it's okay?
And hitting the side of their ships isin't going to be that great, main reason why torpedoes are underwater is that if they hit underwater they do way more damage. If you're striking from air, you usually want to hit the deck from above.

I highly highly doubt it, and if it worked it'd probably be a pretty crappy proof-of-concept carrier. Best to spend a design on it if it's going to be the centrepiece of our naval strategy.

Or just not use aircraft carriers at all and use the beautiful landing strip the nature provides us - the sea.