Nearly Finland wrote:I appreciate the manufacturing and development realism advice. So semi-modern aircraft don't pop up out of nowhere, they have to be gradually developed, bit by bit, starting from flimsy Wright flyers. This makes sense, and is reflected in the region rules as a "culture point cost tech tree". I'm trying to ask more about tactics in the field of battle, though, so maybe more general questions would help. So given 1920s-era aircraft, what types of aircraft would be best at the anti-shipping role? What would they do to go about finding and attacking enemy ships, what methods would be used? Is there any way that they could operate in concert with friendly ships, similar to Close Air Support planes coordinating with ground forces?
Yes but the idea was still primitive until the late '30s (at which point it only needed a war to be put into practice). The U.S. Navy was experimenting with airborne aircraft carriers USS Macon and USS Akron, for example, and the aircraft carrier (Langley, Lexington, and Saratoga at the time) was primarily limited to the screening role of battle fleets alongside light and heavy cruisers. The utility of aerial reconnaissance was the first identified use for aircraft, primarily because it was a direct descendant of aerial reconnaissance performed by balloon barges and such as far back as Napoleon's time. It is also its most important use today, but attacking things is also obviously useful.
There are probably books you can find on the subject of Interwar naval aviation development though. I don't know a lot about it. It probably goes something like this:
1) Launch planes in suspected direction of boats based on intuition.
2) Planes radio back that they've found the enemy, or not, and possibly bomb them.
3) Repeat until enemy found.
4) Carrier radios back to battle fleet the direction of the enemy.
5) Battle fleet shows up and kills the enemy in a surface engagement.
Or something akin to that.
Just read some books about it or something.
Nearly Finland wrote:EDIT: And, of course, how effective is the AA of the battle fleet against them?
If radar guided and VT fused: extremely.
If not: poorly.
American battleships were the best anti-aircraft escorts of the WW2.
Purpelia wrote:To be fair, if he does not have a WW1 his setting won't have a lot of the aviation experience that sprung up from that war. So if he wants to have aircraft be a non factor (relatively) he can simply say that they do exist but because that experience is lacking people still look at them as novelty scout machines. And thus even if somebody did strap a V8 to them the focus was more on delivering more mail or flying faster and further and nobody really thought to develop proper bombing tactics, squadron flying tactics etc. And that would basically kill the aircraft as a bomber until some proper fighting was done for people to figure these things out the hard way.
WW1 was not the beginning of aircraft in military use. Their utility was already widely understood in military circles, what was lacking was the technology of the time. If anything, it just means that said understanding will be more compartmentalized, since fewer people will have access to the relevant information.
Douhet had far more influence than any military "lessons" of WW1, which was principally "planes are necessary for reconnaissance and for preventing the enemy from reconnoitering", and Douhet's theories predate WW1 anyway, since he was already talking about huge bombers and "command of the air" before Italy even entered the war. "Lessons" from wars are rarely necessary to be fought for to be understood, or even discovered. What is necessary is an approximate understanding of the technological-economic conditions of the time period, which can be acquired by good information.
Which is to say that wars are primarily where pre-war theory is tested, rather than developed, and WW1 was hardly fertile ground for theory testing. All relevant aviation theory was developed prior to and after WW1, with little emphasis on the actual war itself, because no one had tested the concepts of strategic bombing or whatever. They tried to test them and they failed, which I guess is an accomplishment? Except not really. It contributed no actual knowledge except the observation of "planes are not yet ready" and the theory-crafting continued unabated as aviation progressed through the '10s and '20s. Planes never got swole enough to do anything besides shoot other planes and take pictures until after WW1. Planes weren't swole enough to do much of anything besides that and maybe some harassment bombings until the 1930s.
What actually was a serious test for airpower was WW2, and it broadly failed to live up to its pre-war claims, but it showed that you could bombard enemy industry and win a war that way. So there will still be Popular Mechanics magazines decrying the gas warfare of the future with radio controlled bombers and metal zeppelins lighting unquenchable firestorms across all cities. Much in the manner that people say atomic war is the end of the world, it wasn't and wouldn't be. Yet we still have nuclear weapons and people still built ICBMs. Strange, that.
tl;dr No.
Posted: Tue Oct 03, 2017 3:48 pm
