Krakatoa wrote:.
I was not going to bother but I suppose I can take some of my time to enlighten Tobius.
I will reply.
In the real world the FAA does not come back to RN control till mid 1939 - far too late for the FAA to be able to make any real improvements before wars start, RN are left with obsolete aircraft and ships that have been designed to work with obsolete aircraft {carriers} (Illustrious). In the AU's I have been running the FAA is reconstituted in 1930 under RN control. This allows the FAA to put out its own tenders for all forms of aircraft, fighters, dive bombers, torpedo bombers. It no longer needs to accept hybrid aircraft trying to do two or three jobs badly. It no longer needs to design its carriers to survive because they did not have the modern aircraft to protect them.
1. Notwithstanding that it takes a full generation to learn how to operate aircraft carriers properly, something that is considerably longer than ten years, and which the Royal Navy could not do in ten years once it lost its naval aviation control and actually misused the expertise of men such as Admiral Lumley Lister, the brains behind the Taranto raid, and that the excuse that the FAA at the time did not understand or know how to formulate a request for tender for aircraft that operate from ships is an excuse that I've heard just once too often to be justified by blaming the RAF for it, I will address that argument again. If you want to place the blame properly for this situation of wrong type aircraft carriers and inadequate aircraft; then the culprit is Admiral Sir Reginald Henderson, Third Sea Lord, and the assorted incompetents who pencil pushed with him. He was the one who saddled the RN with wrong-builds such as Illustrious and Formidable, when he should have pushed for lessons-learned Ark Royals. Wrong bird farms resulted in wrong aircraft procurement as a consequence. Why buy the right planes when the planes you wanted wouldn't fit the ships you bought? Hmm, little things like takeoff runs, hanger capacity, and appropriate engines also seem to be a problem? The Americans with their big cavernous flattops with the huge open hangers can buy the big burly engined planes to go with them. (If the RN had bothered to look, they would see US flattops running around with planes parked on the flight deck and worked on there in the weather, a practice that the British and Japanese eschewed.) The RN did build the Ark Royal, which was a thoroughly modern 'Japanese' design at least as good as the Soryu, but they missed the whole do routine things on the flight deck hard stands and use the hanger as a repair garage concept.
THAT is what made the hundred plane American carriers possible and so tough to sink. (Armored hangers full of planes are a guaranteed loss of ship after one internal hit. HIJMS ships, Akagi, Hiryu, Soryu, Taiho, Shinano, HMS Hermes, Glorious, Eagle, Courageous and the Ark Royal, herself. It's remarkable that the British and the Japanese, and America's modern competitors never understand that about aircraft carriers. Topheavy=turn turtle and sink; not to mention the usual internal hull explosions, that force abandonment, as aircraft, fuel and bombs in the armored closed hanger light off.
The Americans usually simply patched the hole in the flight deck or the hull and they pushed the burning planes and bombs over the side and put out the fires. This is what kept the Saratoga and the Enterprise in business.
Even when sunk, it was a tough thing for an enemy to accomplish as the USS Hornet (a loss) illustrates this aspect of the difference in how navies do things..
2. If you know anything about the USN's naval aviation and what it learned in the Pacific War, you will learn a curious detail about its combat experience. Once it discovered that its fighters could dive bomb. (Hellcats and Wildcats) those planes dive-bombed. Once it discovered that the Avenger torpedo bomber could also dive-bomb, the follow on plane, the Helldiver, intended to be the next purpose built dive bomber, which was a Curtiss built failure and a horribly badly designed aircraft intended to strictly dive-bomb and scout was sort of sidelined and its place entirely taken up by Avengers as scouts/attackers and Hellcats as dive bomber supplements and protection, who split the scout/attack and fighter duties between them. Bearcats and Skyraiders coming into service towards the end of that war were intended to scout, bomb and torpedo in a single package. So you might see that the RN FAA stumbled into the general purpose attack plane that war actually showed was the operational trend when the Skua/Roc combo showed up for them in 1938. Fortuitous accident? Probably, but in an AU vein, it was an opportunity they muffed with the Roc when they tried a navalized Boulton Defiant layout and screwed it all up. Bad theory conflicted with operational reality. You need to watch that when you think AU possibilities.
3. I also gently remind you, that it was the RAF, not the FAA, historically who figured out how to make Seafires and Sea Hurricanes. Those worked, not as well as a Hellcat, but they were RAF developed and unlike the Gloster F5/34, the planes could compete with the Zeke as well as the Wildcat did and in essence that is just good enough to get the work done provided the pilots and carrier air divisions know their business. If you have ever read the First Team by John Lundstrum he goes into exhaustive detail about everything I tell you here.
Therefore F5/34 is in response to an FAA request, and all those points you raise about navalising what becomes the Gloster Griffon have already been accounted for in the original design specs, same with the armament. The RN already uses the 0.5" mg ammunition so keeping the logistics tight is a worthwhile exercise. I have used the profile design of F5/34 only - the rest of the aircraft is built up in response to the FAA request - not the real life time line.
4. It is too small in the barrel to take a proper sized naval air cooled radial. In this case we are sort of case restricted to the Bristol Hercules (my proposed engine fix for the Roc which could accept that engine.) the American equivalent to the Hercules is the Pratt R-1830. It powered the Wildcat. That was a four ton (imperial measure) fighter. If you want the British made AU fighter to take a competitive engine and you insist the plane/engine combo match be remotely realistic in your stated time frame development then you will be stuffing Merlins into navalized Hurricanes equipped with a Wildcat type rolling foldback wing and either Oerlikon FFL cannon or an early version of the Hispano HS404 and that in pairs for the plane, not in fours. Otherwise it is the Browning 303 (6 max.). It's what you have available. Nothing else works. Nothing.
5. You must not hand-wave solutions when you AU. Otherwise it isn't even remotely possible to defend the choices made. You can suggest an evolved Skua/Roc combo which makes sense. You can suggest an early version of the 1942 emergency program Colossus class aircraft carrier as the base ship and you can justify as rationalized the air group of Roc-Skua-Gladiator as its main armament.
6. But if you do that in the mid 30s to late 30s onward, you have to deal with the British limitations existent. You won't get a proper American style naval air force, you won't have their radial engine tech and logistics base, you won't have their superior naval air defense doctrine, you won't have their aircraft carrier operations experience,
or their other tools. What you do have is British.
a. You should be using liquid cooled engines. Superior performers in many ways to the American radials and there is no American liquid cooled engine as good as the Merlin. None.
b. Your planes overall will be a generation behind in build technique. You will have superior supercharger and baseline engine tech, but in such other things as carburetors and in overall airframe design, you are a decade behind Grumman, Douglass, and Lockheed. And forget about propellers and guns. Hamilton Standard and John Browning were made in the USA. Catchup is quick historically, (Hispano Suisa is just across the channel as is Farman in France.)
c. British naval AAA is no good and will always be no good until you import from Sweden. You don't have the fire control two axis predict leads of the US Navy, either, so you won't get the most out of Oelikon and Bofors when you do import. Forget about the heavy AAA for high angle fire. British medium guns (4'->5.25') are H/A or L/A and not designed at all to be D/P like the US 5/38. Not even the British 4/50 is any good. This is as much a function of shell characteristic as it is of the original hand feed nature of these British guns. US guns (3' and 5') were
semi-automatics with better time fusing and lighter in weight AA shells. Intended for AAA right from the start, anti-ship was an add-on and those shells were considered and designed to fit an AA gun. Not the other way around.
d.
British doctrine should drive what AU possibilities for them that could be exploited. I've already mentioned early Sea Hurricane, for the fighter (if you insist) but it occurs to me, here, that for a navy that should be terrified of U-boats, not much attention in this thread has been paid to THAT aspect of RN aircraft carrier warfare or of the way the Germans intended the Lutzows and the U-boats to complement each other in a commerce raider war. Perhaps you now perceive why I insist so much on the scouting/bombing aircraft mix in a pre-radar equipped RN aircraft carrier force and why 'fighters' don't bother me so much? This force does not expect to fight the battle of Midway, or it shouldn't. It has to expect another Battle of the Atlantic. It's job is to hunt GERMAN subs and surface raiders and attack the same by bombing. Anything BRITISH RN AU should be based on that understanding.
