Crysuko wrote:not sure if this is the thread for it, but I have a question regarding air forces.
is an aircraft carrier capable of carrying and servicing at least one heavy bomber aircraft (think B1 lancer or similar). for purposes of strategic bombing missions
Yes.
It's called "dry land".
Carriers with intercontinental bombers don't exist because intercontinental bombers don't need to move closer to their targets. They can already hit anything they need to hit from the homeland. USS United States was a stupid idea and we're all better off that it's dead. Otherwise the U.S. Navy might actually not exist in any serious form today, except undersea, because its entire carrier fleet tried to compete with the Air Force instead of doing something original and novel like it did IRL.
The Akasha Colony wrote:Crysuko wrote:not sure if this is the thread for it, but I have a question regarding air forces.
is an aircraft carrier capable of carrying and servicing at least one heavy bomber aircraft (think B1 lancer or similar). for purposes of strategic bombing missions
No.
The whole point of an aircraft carrier is to be able to move the air base closer to the target, reducing the need for huge, extremely long-range bombers.
Carriers are historically abysmal at the job of strategic attack. They are OK-ish at kicking open doors for the real bombers (B-52, B-1, B-2) to fly through.
Allanea wrote:Crysuko wrote:not sure if this is the thread for it, but I have a question regarding air forces.
is an aircraft carrier capable of carrying and servicing at least one heavy bomber aircraft (think B1 lancer or similar). for purposes of strategic bombing missions
No, nor is there a point.
If you have an aircraft carrier, you can carry out 'strategic bombing missions' with regular-sized carrier aircraft.
Ah. So that's why the U.S. military got rid of B-52 when the Navy bought some Forrestals and Kitty Hawks. Or the Royal Navy got rid of the V-bombers when it bought the Invincibles. Or the Soviet Union got rid of the Tu-160 when it got Kuznetsov. It all makes sense now. Carriers cannot perform the strategic bombing mission, because strategic bombing implies using nuclear weapons against population-economic centers (cities), and carrier aircraft are both too small and too short legged to do this.
Historically, the carrier target has been military in nature, while the strategic bomber (until the advent of B-2's ~design mission~) has always been an economic weapon, designed to destroy industry. Carriers are bad at attacking economies because they have to get too close to their targets to do so. They are OK at destroying coastal airbases, bridges, and ports with nuclear weapons because these are not very hard targets and can be disabled/destroyed by small nuclear weapons or carrier-size conventional raids. They are also very good at providing a modicum of aviation in a quick amount of time in the middle of nowhere, faster than it would take to ship a fighter squadron from one supercontinent to the other, which is their other main thing.
So really they're just either ASW islands that live in the middle of the sea or they're crowbars for prying open the door to the enemy's hinterlands so the B-52s can nuke Leningrad and all the communists that live in it.