How do I design my carriers?

[NLForces]

Question is in the thread. To explain slightly more:
I tend to remove all armour on my carriers (and I mean ALL armour) 0" of deck armour, 2" of belt armour, magazine box, inclined belt, everything to save weight xD
What do I spend that into?

1: planes
You can get up to 320 aircraft with one carrier of 75.000 tons of displacement. That is enough to get such a ridiculous amount of CAP up that nothing will get through (in theory)
Just to elaborate, that is more than a average WW2 airfield. And its floating lol.

2: AA
I slabang as much AA on as possible. I'm talking 40 6-inch Dual-Purpose guns and like 50-60 Dual-Purpose 4-inch guns. (and 2 8-inch guns because Naval board said so).
Add the maximum amount of light and medium AA, and you will (in theory) vaporize any enemy aircraft, might it get past your CAP.


Is this a smart move? How do you design your carrier? is it as insane as mine? Or do you have a better ratio?

[dizzy]

You should read the manual. It will give tips on things. I usually armor my carriers that have 100 planes with deck armor to withstand splinters and flight deck armor to withstand 1000lbs bombs or more. I also armor them to withstand a few broadsides from any CL that would manage to get its 6” guns in range. Beyond that, I try and keep them 33 knots or faster to keep away from BCs. It’s pretty hard to do all that and the cost is terrible. So I build only a few of them and then buy some lightly armored escort carriers at a third the price that I’m willing to lose. It’s a cost thing.

There’s a few other threads that detail how to build good carriers, I’m still not certain I’m doing it right, but you’ll find that that the carriers Britain or Italy will build will be entirely different from the type of carriers Japan or the USA would build. So their theater of operation will dictate the type of carrier outfitting it needs. Pacific carriers need long range and a lot of planes and can sacrifice armor to do it. But in the Mediterranean, you’ll be bombed and torpedoed from land bases so you’ll need more armor and defense and less strike planes. CAP is huge there.

So experiment around, but know putting more than 100 planes on a carrier slows your sortie rate due to inefficiency. You’re also putting all your eggs in one basket. I’ve lost a Fleet Carrier or two to a sub attack. When that happens, it’s just awful.

Hey, anyone think fleet carrier losses should lead to a prestige hit?

[dohboy]

I have noticed that the more aircraft you put on a carrier the more time it spends running into the wind. That can become a problem when the enemy happens to be upwind. I usually don't go any more than 140.

I don't go any higher than 31 knots with them either. It is usually pretty easy to keep them out of trouble with that as long as you don't have to run towards the enemy to launch and recover aircraft, and when you do the higher speed only gets you in trouble faster. I always try to get my carriers upwind of the enemy or to the side when the battle starts just to minimize that issue.

[tbr]

The penalty for more than 100 planes on a single carrier is steep. Ready/launch times grow so much you may miss the strike window or your strikes fail to find targets since the time between launch command and the strike beginning to search in the target area is to long. Better to have the maximum number of CV`s in your navy that can be picked in a fleet battle, I had up to 12 carriers in a mega battle. That comes to 1200 planes (800 strike planes in my mix), mostof them that re not attrited in battle can do 2-4 strikes in a long scenario.

[sloanjh]

Sept 3, 2019 14:44:02 GMT -6 tbr said:

The penalty for more than 100 planes on a single carrier is steep. Ready/launch times grow so much you may miss the strike window or your strikes fail to find targets since the time between launch command and the strike beginning to search in the target area is to long. Better to have the maximum number of CV`s in your navy that can be picked in a fleet battle, I had up to 12 carriers in a mega battle. That comes to 1200 planes (800 strike planes in my mix), mostof them that re not attrited in battle can do 2-4 strikes in a long scenario.

This tends to be my philosophy (although I haven't confirmed the inefficiency curve about 100 planes, I simply believe it ).  I use 4" hull and 2"deck armor, and load up as much DP AA as I can (8x2x6" wings, max 2x5" secondary and max 2x4" tertiary - I don't remember for CV is max secondary is 24 or 20).  I also max out medium and light AA, with a 2-3:1 ratio of medium:light.  This is based on medium being guaranteed to hit/disrupt before the attack, while light may or may not, balanced by the things I've seen posted about diminishing returns in AA strength effectiveness.  I also go for 29-ish kt CV; anything faster tends to get them into trouble more quickly.  (Note that this last is definitely me adapting to game mechanics rather than reality, given the short engagement ranges.)

So my fleet CV tend to be 100ac, 30-something kton, 29-ish knots, which aren't horribly expensive to build.  OTOH, I try to build 1xCLAA for every CV, so that's an extra $40M for each CV.  My air wings tend to be 2xF, 1xTB, 2xDB twenty plane squadrons, although I'm contemplating going to 3xF so that I can send full squadrons of F on strike escort without hurting CAP.

My philosophy is that I'll trade tonnage for a plane for significant increase in AA, but overall I'm going for best efficiency for the CV (in terms of cost/plane) rather than going for quality in the CV.  This is in contrast to my gun-combatant strategy, where I always go for quality over quantity.

Another benefit of having lots of CV available: I usually end up with at least some carriers in my main force.  So I've pretty much stopped building CVL after the initial conversions.

[aeson]

To tbr's comment I'll add that 6" DP isn't great HAA - per gun, 6" DP is only as good as 5" DP when both have autoloaders and is only about as good as 3"-4" DP when neither have autoloaders, as far as HAA performance is concerned. 5" / 4" is a better HAA suite for the tonnage invested than 6" / 4".

I don't remember for CV is max secondary is 24 or 20

CVs, at least of the size I build (<40,000 tons) are soft-capped (-10 ROF mod) at 16 main battery and 16 secondary battery guns; the hard cap appears to be the same as for any other ship type.

[sloanjh]

Sept 3, 2019 18:34:29 GMT -6 aeson said:

[SNIP]

I don't remember for CV is max secondary is 24 or 20

CVs, at least of the size I build (<40,000 tons) are soft-capped (-10 ROF mod) at 16 main battery and 16 secondary battery guns; the hard cap appears to be the same as for any other ship type.

Thanks - soft cap was what I was talking about; obviously I didn't remember that it was all the way down to 16.  So my CV run 8x2x6", 8x2x5", and 12x2x4".  Just finished one game and am now 1905 AH at war with Italy, so I didn't have any CV designs handy.

[NLForces]

Yeah for secondaries (/Dual purpose) I was talking purely out of memory. Was probably wildly off with my guestimate.

Thanks for the tips btw, didn't know about the plane penalties over 100 aircraft.
And yes, this was playing as the USA, so I could afford like 6 of those carriers

[tbr]

The plane penalties seem to be soft, but when you compare a 140+ plane carrier's performance to a 100 plane one you can notice the difference. I would really appreciate if, like with soft ROF/ACC penalties, then excess palne penalty would be transparent to the player. After all navies would do extensive experimentation and trials both "dry" (on a land airbase with marked outlines and some rules for lift simulation) and "wet" trials (with older carriers and, of course, after commissioning with the new one) on air operations, especially strike management.

Ideally we could get the value in three stages, first an estimate when doing the original design (the "BUAIR estimate"), second a more refined estimate after the design period has completed (the "BUAIR study") and third a definite number when the workup is complete (or the FOC reaches "fair" crew quality). This could open up the possibility to have special results where some carriers have exceptionally good air complement handling characteristics even with higher plane numbers, but also the possibility for worse results even with smaller complements. The spread of results could be connected to the shipboard air ops tech level as well.