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Post by director on Aug 23, 2018 7:57:12 GMT -6
Along with displacement and other factors, time period should be considered: a carrier considered first-rate in the 1930s (Courageous and Glorious for example) might not be in the 1940s. So I'm not sure you can come up with a 'fleet carrier' standard that would be the same from 1920 (for example) to 1950. It's the same with battleships - USS Arkansas was no longer usable in a line of battle in WW2, though she was undoubtedly a battleship.
A definition of a'fleet carrier' is like a definition of pornography: I know it when I see it but it can be hard to say why. A definition of an aircraft carrier, however, is pretty straightforward - and I think more useful. I'd go further and say that 'fleet carrier' might be a useful design name or loose category for operations but in service the ships would be defined by their use-of-the-moment instead. The little escort carriers at Leyte Gulf wreaked havoc on cruisers and capital ships but were not 'fleet carriers' while some of their bigger cousins served as aircraft transports or ASW ships for short times. A carrier can carry and operate aircraft; its limitations are hangar and flight deck size, stores and fuel carried and ship speed. Pretty much any naval power possessing a carrier will use that carrier for any required role, with regard to operational priorities. US naval designations like CV, CVL, CVE and such were descriptions of construction and intended use... but come the need, the CVEs and Ryujo and Ise too all found themselves under fire.
So I don't say that 'fleet carrier' isn't a useful tag, but it is transitory and speaks to intended use - it is not a definition.
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Post by aeson on Aug 23, 2018 8:18:08 GMT -6
If displacement is not a metric and has little correlation to capability, then why did the Washington Naval Treaty in Article IX specify that "No aircraft carrier exceeding 27,000 tons standard displacement shall be acquired by, or constructed by, for or within the jurisdiction of, any of the Contacting Powers. " It imposed sets of upper limits on the capabilities of the carrier. That doesn't make displacement a useful characteristic for classifying a carrier, however - it might perhaps be possible to say that a carrier of less than X tons cannot be a fleet carrier for (reasons), though historical fleet carriers and historical escort or auxiliary carriers occupy roughly the same range of displacements, but it isn't possible to say that a carrier of over Y tons must be a fleet carrier for (reasons), except maybe that "no one" is going to build an escort/auxiliary carrier larger than Y tons because it'd be wasteful - though Shinano might constitute evidence to the contrary.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 23, 2018 9:39:31 GMT -6
If you read through the limitations of the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, you will find that the limits on the aircraft carriers was different from the those of the capital ships. The capital ship limits were based on current ships in service, the carriers on future developments which is why tonnage was so important.
Naval aviation was still in its early stages of development, and many of the technical and tactical questions concerning the use of carriers was still being studied. Where were carriers to be deployed; with the fleet or with the scouting force? How many aircraft could they carrier; well, how heavy is each aircraft and its ordnance. Would they have heavy artillery like eight-inch guns, the Lexington’s did. The issue of scouting for the fleet raised new problems; how fast should they go, which at the time was not a factor for launching wooden aircraft, but with the advent of Duraluminum in 1923, aircraft now got heavier and required more carrier speed and a longer deck to launch. The planes might get bigger, so the hangars would get bigger. All factors were almost indeterminable at the time of the treaty, so the treaty designers used the one factor that could restrict carriers, displacement. They understood how the various characteristics would contribute to total displacement and they reasoned that displacement was a key way to restrict not only carrier size but air wing sizes, but it still left room for innovation. The total tonnage restriction effectively eliminated any specialized carriers with specialized aircraft. The idea by the treaty designers was to allow for multi-purpose ships intended to carry air wings that could effectively carry out their missions. You can’t put heavy artillery on carriers under these rules, the weight limitation effectively stopped that until technological innovation could change all this. Which in fact it did.
Anyway, this is the reason I believe that displacement was and is an important characteristic of an aircraft carrier. Nice discussion.
Note: I wanted to provide exact definition that the Washington Naval Treaty used. This is the complete, official definition.
Aircraft-carrier
An aircraft-carrier is defined as a vessel of war with a displacement in excess of 10,000 tons (10,160 metric tons) standard displacement designed for the specific and exclusive purpose of carrying aircraft. It must be so constructed that aircraft can be launched from and landed thereon, and not designed and constructed for carrying a more powerful armament than that allowed to it under Article IX or Article X as the case may be. (eight inch guns were the limit)
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Post by aeson on Aug 23, 2018 14:38:18 GMT -6
If we were talking about categorizing 'fleet' carriers into 'light' fleet carriers (CVL), [normal]/'attack' fleet carriers (CV/CVA), and 'large'/'heavy' fleet carriers (CVB), it might be reasonably appropriate to trade the precision of a set of more specific metrics (such as speed and endurance of the carrier and size and capability of its air wing) for the concision of a single more general metric (such as displacement) which correlates to the set of more specific metrics, because in restricting ourselves to classifying 'fleet' carriers into various subtypes we've ensured that the carriers under discussion have certain broadly similar characteristics and in doing so have ensured that displacement correlates much more strongly to the characteristics that determine whether a "fleet" carrier is a CVL, a CV/CVA, or a CVB. We are not, however, discussing how we categorize "fleet carriers" into CVLs, CVs/CVAs, and CVBs - we're discussing how we categorize "aircraft carriers" into "fleet carriers" and "escort or auxiliary carriers," and the things which distinguish between these two types do not strongly correlate with the displacement of historical examples of the two types of carriers.
Many escort/auxiliary carriers and (light) fleet carriers are more or less the same size or displacement - Commencement Bay and Independence, for example, or Casablanca and Ryujo. What distinguishes 'fleet' and 'escort'/'auxiliary' carriers from one another often has far less to do with the physical size of the ship than with things like the internal arrangements or the power of the engines actually installed. HMS Argus and USS Ranger, Ryujo and USS Casablanca, and USS Commencement Bay and USS Independence are three pairs of similarly-sized carriers - Argus and Ranger are about 15,000 tons standard displacement, Ryujo and Casablanca about 8000 tons, Commencement Bay and Independence about 11,000 tons. Ranger, Ryujo, and Independence are capable of steaming at about 30 knots; Argus, Casablanca, and Commencement Bay at about 19 knots. Ranger can operate an air group of about 70 aircraft, Ryujo about 40, Argus about 20, and the others about 30. Argus has a range of about 3,600 nmi at 10 knots, Independence about 13,000 nmi at 15 knots, Ranger 10,000 nmi at 15 knots, Ryujo 10,000 nmi at 14 knots, Casablanca 10,240 nmi at 15 knots, and Commencement Bay about 8320 nmi at 15 knots. If I ask you to categorize each of these six carriers as "fleet" or "escort"/"auxiliary" carriers, which of these would you categorize as fleet carriers and which would you categorize as escort/auxiliary carriers? What information given above is most useful? What information is not useful?
What I notice in this set is that there are two basic groups - a set of ~30-knot carriers capable of steaming 10,000+ nmi at 14-15 knots and operating air groups of 30+ aircraft, and a set of <20-knot carriers capable of steaming ~10,000- nmi at 10-15 knots and operating air groups of ~30- aircraft. Notably, both groups have one aircraft carrier at each of the three nominal displacements - the first set has the ~8000-ton Ryujo, the ~11,000-ton Independence, and the ~15,000-ton Ranger while the second has the ~8,000-ton Casablanca, the ~11,000-ton Commencement Bay, and the ~15,000-ton Argus. Ranger, Independence, and Ryujo are typically classified as fleet or light fleet carriers; Casablanca and Commencement Bay as escort carriers; and Argus from roughly the mid-30s mostly as an auxiliary or training carrier. As a characterizing trait for distinguishing between 'fleet' and 'escort' or 'auxiliary' carriers, the displacements of these six carriers is pretty much useless whereas the more specific characteritsics - speed, aircraft capacity, and range - are more useful for characterizing the carriers.
If you expand the set under consideration to all the aircraft carriers which participated in the Second World War, does displacement become a more useful discriminating characteristic? Maybe it could be useful for quickly distinguishing the larger fleet carriers such as the Yorktowns and Essexes from the smaller light fleet and escort carriers, but the existence of carriers such as Eagle, Bearn, and Shinano indicate that the issues which make displacement a questionable discriminating characteristic for distinguishing between 'fleet' and 'escort' or 'auxiliary' carriers at the low end of the size scale also exist through the middle of and at the high end of the size scale (granted, Bearn and Eagle were very old carriers by the Second World War, Shinano was a bit of a rush-job, and all three were conversions). It might work well enough for distinguishing CVs/CVAs/CVBs from CVLs/CVEs - Bearn, Eagle, and Shinano are fairly atypical of the larger aircraft carriers - but it doesn't work for distinguishing between "fleet" and "escort/auxiliary" carriers.
Also, the Treaty of Washington definition of an "aircraft carrier" is more or less completely irrelevant to the discussion of how you classify aircraft carriers into "fleet" and "escort" or "auxiliary" categories. The most it does is give us a definition for what an "aircraft carrier" is - but what we're trying to do is classify "aircraft carriers" into "fleet" and "escort"/"auxiliary" subtypes.
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Post by bcoopactual on Aug 23, 2018 18:28:05 GMT -6
Couple of thoughts I'd add: Consider how naming conventions evolve with the changes in prominence of various weapon systems - e.g.how submarines in US service went from numbers, to fish, to essentially taking over city/state names previously used by cruisers and battleships. So you could say that depending on how a navy evolves, what it considers a capital ship changes - and with it, so do the names. A carrier-heavy navy might well "take over" naming conventions of battleships if it considers the carrier its primary weapon, or it might give them very "pedestrian" names if it only considers them auxiliary vessels (as they were in many cases envisioned early on). So, it's tricky! I would lean towards the more "auxiliary" side, though, at least initially - the Japanese are a good example, because while their converted carriers kept the capital-ship names they had as battleships/cruisers, their purpose-built carrier names pretty clearly suggested their "lesser" status - naming ships after birds up to that point was pretty much restricted to auxiliary vessels and torpedo boats, and that's roughly where Japanese doctrine had originally placed their carriers (i.e. as auxiliary to the battle fleet). This was more or less the same elsewhere - purpose-built carriers prior to WWII seemed to inherit, at most, frigate-level naming conventions. With the exceptions of conversions from older capital ships that kept their names, it was until WWII that they began to get "true" capital-ship status and naming. And I'd be wary of setting up naming conventions in RTW that rely on the World Wars having happened, because that's inside the game's time frame. I don't know how the game will classify carriers, but one easy way to resolve this conundrum is to distinguish between auxiliary/escort carriers and true fleet carriers - and maybe to do something similar to how the evolution from B to BB goes in RTW right now, where until they gain certain tonnage, features and performance, carrier designs are classed as an auxiliary type and named as such, until a nation develops (or converts?) a carrier design that can't be considered anything other than a fleet carrier. That way, carriers will be "stuck" with auxiliary naming conventions until they actually become capital ships. As far as I'm aware, only the Japanese changed their carrier naming conventions in WW2. The follow-on ships in the Unryu-class were named after mountains which had previously been the convention for battlecruisers. Who knows what the naming convention is for the Royal Navy's large ships, they could use anything from Roman gods, Greek heroes, royalty, famous ships of the past, battles and admirals and generals. As long as the King or Queen approved. The Americans stayed with their convention for aircraft carrier names (which subsumed the battlecruiser convention because they never finished any except as carriers) until FDR's death and then post-war when politics became important. (Well, of increased importance to get keep a healthy slice of the overall military budget.) Politics is the reason we name submarines after cities and now states as well. As far as what name list to use, that should be settled simply by choosing the classification you want. If you choose CVE then the ship's name should come from that list. Same for CV. Honestly, based on historical precedent you don't really need a seperate list for CVL or CVB, the names were consistent with the conventions for CV for the most part. Ideally one change I would like to see made in RTW2 is to add another layer to the naming system. Instead of a single list for each country with the list divided by ship classification, make a folder for each country. Then inside each country's folder have theme lists. Something like the lists I made up for British destroyer names in the RTW forum. So for the Japanese for example, you could have one list of mountains, one list of provinces, one of cities, rivers, winds and tides, etc. For the British, you could have the DD lists although I'm not sure what you would do with the mess that is their capital ships (strictly from a naming convention viewpoint, no disrespect intended). For submarines you would have the choice of using names or choosing letter prefixes (and preferably the starting number but I'm not sure how much of a pain that would be to program) And then for the US it would be the same. States and cities obviously, famous or highly decorated people's names for destroyers and perhaps another set of names for escorts. Fish for the submarines and battles and famous ships for battlecruisers and carriers would have their own lists. Then in the ship design screen you would have a drop down menu above the Ship's name field. You select the theme list and then all of the ships for that class would come from that theme list. You might have to group the lists or something so if the computer ran out of names it would automatically move to the next appropriate list for that ship class (or maybe have the computer ask which list to go to if it runs out of names in the original list). The developers would also have to figure out how to make the AI work with the lists. [Edit - Thinking about this it might be better to put the drop down menu for the theme in the build screen instead of or in addition to the design screen since that is where you will normally have need for multiple ship names. It would also allow you to easily use one or more lists for the same class (i.e. V & W class destroyers)] One advantage of a system like that is if the player wants to break with historical conventions (i.e. name American battleships after battles) it's easier to do without having to type in every name manually. That's a pretty cosmetic request and so a low priority and only the developers could answer if it's worth the trouble to program. I can say for any player like myself that prefers order among their ship names it would be a welcome change. As far as displacement, I'm with aeson on that. What determines whether a fleet carrier is a fleet carrier is really whether it has the range and speed to operate with the battlefleet and the ability to operate up-to-date aircraft. With the possibility of rare exceptions, if it can do that it's a fleet carrier, if not it's an auxiliary carrier. If it's a fleet carrier the size of the airwing would probably be the primary determiner of CVL/CV/CVB status ( Shinano is a special case and really shouldn't be used for making game rules about normal classifications). Displacement is just going to follow whatever it needs to for the designer to accomplish those other characteristics so displacement by itself doesn't really mean anything. I could build a 2 million ton aircraft carrier out of pykrete with an air wing of 150 twin engine planes and its still not going to be a fleet carrier because it's only going to travel at 6 knots max.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 23, 2018 19:04:59 GMT -6
Well, then the issue is settled. I've presented my thoughts and the facts behind them. This was my goal and its done. Thank you for allowing me to present my ideas. Good luck to all.
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fifey
New Member
Posts: 28
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Post by fifey on Aug 26, 2018 0:16:15 GMT -6
As per bcoopactual's post, I definitely think sublists and custom lists easily accessible from a dropdown menu would be a wonderful option for naming ship classes, and though cosmetic it would seem to me to be fairly easy to implement. It's a chore individually naming destroyers, even bulk builds of larger ships, but if they could be popped out based on a themed list that would be great. Perhaps even a choice of determining the name sequentially or a random choice.
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Post by gornik on Aug 26, 2018 9:52:29 GMT -6
For Russian Empire, I propose "bird" names, historically used for airships: Albatros Berkut (golden eagle) Golub (pigeon) Grif (vulture) Kobchik (red-footed falcon) Krechet (gyrfalcon) Lebed (swan) Chaika (gull) Korshun (kite) Yastreb (goshawk) Also, Orlitsa (female eagle) from seaplane tender [Edit] Oh, and I forgot fictional birds from Russian legends and fairy-tales! Sirin Alconost Gamaun Zhar-Ptitsa
For Soviet fleet of 1920-1950, cities should be fine, though some "red romantic" names are also possible, especially for first ones.
Famous Soviet aviators may be used as well - even sill alive (from early 1930th). Chkalov Gromov Vodopianov Lyapidevski Molokov Kamanin Slepnev Doronin Levanevski
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Post by zardoz on Aug 28, 2018 3:33:40 GMT -6
For German ships, one can follow the aviation pioneers road with "Otto Lilienthal" and then put in highly decorated pilots of WW 1, e. g.
Richthofen Immelmann Udet Voss Boelcke Loewenhardt Jacobs
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Post by kungfutreachery on Aug 28, 2018 7:57:07 GMT -6
Having HMS Glory and HMS Glorious operational at the same time would seem a bit redundant...
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Post by vonfriedman on Oct 19, 2018 10:40:26 GMT -6
Presently the A/C carriers of the Italian Navy are named Garibaldi and Cavour (both Founding Fathers: in the past Garibaldi was used for two cruisers, Cavour for a battleship). The seaplane carrier/launcher of 1929 Giuseppe Miraglia was named after a naval aviator of the First World War. Other plausible names are Alessandro Guidoni and Francesco De Pinedo, both aviation pioneers and naval officers before entering the Regia Aeronautica. Recently the name of Paolo Thaon di Revel, admiral of the IWW and founder of the Naval Aviation Service of the Regia Marina was considered for the new 33000 ton LHD currently under construction. Obviously a fascist Italy would have named an aircraft carrier Italo Balbo after his death.
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Post by hrcak47 on Oct 19, 2018 14:14:23 GMT -6
Have you lads considered adding hydroplane tenders? Basically, like CL-tier handler of a handful of hydroplanes (1-4), pitiful in any meaningful combat but quite interesting force multiplier for ASW patrol/colonial service. One of these could take the role of 3ish surface combatants. Their additional roles can be minelaying, and if you have spare good will, you can even implement them for helicopters! Historic example would be ex Royal Yugoslav KJRM Zmaj which became the German Drache, that eventually became world's first helicopter carrier with two Flettner Fl 282. Attachments:
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Post by oldpop2000 on Oct 19, 2018 14:53:11 GMT -6
Well, being simple minded, I’ve developed a simplistic carrier naming system.
For the US, USC-X, where X is a number between 1-? Great Britain - RNC-X Germany- KC-X Italy -RIC-X Russia – RC-X Japan- IJC-X See how it works, much easier to keep track of.
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Post by williammiller on Oct 20, 2018 10:04:58 GMT -6
Have you lads considered adding hydroplane tenders? Basically, like CL-tier handler of a handful of hydroplanes (1-4), pitiful in any meaningful combat but quite interesting force multiplier for ASW patrol/colonial service. One of these could take the role of 3ish surface combatants. Their additional roles can be minelaying, and if you have spare good will, you can even implement them for helicopters! Historic example would be ex Royal Yugoslav KJRM Zmaj which became the German Drache, that eventually became world's first helicopter carrier with two Flettner Fl 282. Seaplane Tenders (USN designation of "AV") will be included in RTW2...as a matter of fact some Beta Team members were testing out designs of those very recently :-)
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Post by hrcak47 on Oct 20, 2018 16:43:39 GMT -6
Seaplane Tenders (USN designation of "AV") will be included in RTW2...as a matter of fact some Beta Team members were testing out designs of those very recently :-) Well this is great to hear!
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