zoomar
Junior Member
Posts: 60
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Post by zoomar on Aug 28, 2020 13:03:18 GMT -6
Playing with the 1900 start, airships seem to evolve reasonably, but I have disagreements with two decisions made by the developers regarding airship capabilities. The most serious is not giving them any ASW value. Even in WW1 airships were very successful in spotting and attacking submarines, and in WW2 USN blimps were also very useful ASW platforms and often thwarted attacks on merchants by their mere presence. It seems odd that they seem to have no such value in the game. The other disappointment is that airship development ends with parasite fighters and doesn't progress on to rigid airships carrying offensive bombers, which were underdevelopment by the USN before the program ended in the late 1930's. Give the alternate history premise of the game, it would be fascinating to have them...airships that, in addition to spotting enemy ships, could attack them with a squadron of dive bombers (handled as a combat event resolved automatically and noted in the reports)
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spacenerd4
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Appreciating our feline friends
Posts: 164
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Post by spacenerd4 on Aug 29, 2020 14:20:09 GMT -6
What about allowing you to control them as CVs with a single squadron of aircraft and a speed of 80 kts?
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Post by archelaos on Aug 29, 2020 14:34:16 GMT -6
I always thought that airships would make a great platform for launching ASMs. Rigid ones had enough carry capacity to lift good radar set and some long range rockets
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spacenerd4
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Post by spacenerd4 on Aug 29, 2020 14:46:14 GMT -6
Definitely!
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 29, 2020 15:18:40 GMT -6
I always thought that airships would make a great platform for launching ASMs. Rigid ones had enough carry capacity to lift good radar set and some long range rockets Airships are great targets, slow and have a great radar reflectivity. Their effectiveness against U-boats is really based on the fact that the U-boat or any WW2 submarine had little air defenses and its best defense was to submerge until they got radar. Here is a good article on their effectiveness. www.smithsonianmag.com/blogs/air-space-museum/2020/07/13/k-ships-vs-u-boats/
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Post by andrewm on Aug 30, 2020 2:51:38 GMT -6
Interestingly one US Airship the K-74 was shot down by a U-Boat the U-134 and one crew memmber died, and this Airship was lost because it closed into gun range of a surfaced U-Boat and proved vulnerable to gunfire. Historically by the end of the WW1 airships were unsurvivable in the face of heavier than aircraft, at the start of the war there had been a window were the height they could reach and the limitations of aircraft meant they were viable as weapons of war but better aircraft and better weapons for aircraft meant that they could no longer operate in any area which was in range of hostile aircraft. Hence their last use by the US as ASW surveillance in US Coastal waters, the US did not try to use blimps for long range recon against the Japanese because of that vulnerability. As for ASM Platforms , most ASM's have a reach of less than a hundred miles, the longest ranged reach about 300 it is unbelievable that a Blimp could survive to reach a range of a hundred miles against a carrier's fighters , long range bombers had problems doing that. Then there is launching a rocket from a blimp, you would have to drop it and ignite the engine after release as I suspect very few people would willingly be on the blimp if the rocket was ignited on the hull plus the missiles weighed too much until the advent of light ASM's like Harpoon and Exocet and those were very short ranged. Hindenburg a large airship of good design and using Hydrogen for maximum lift had a useful lift weight of about 10000kg (wikipedia) an SS-N-2 Styx the first effective ASM had a weight of 2500kg, you could cut some of that for an air launched missile as it has height to start off with but then you need to increase the range a lot , so not many missiles per blimp. Then the Blimps need someone to provide over the horizon targeting to launch the attack not easy even today. So we need to attack a worthwhile target a fleet of Dozens of attack blimps which avoid detection and then survice to fight another day against jet fighters 5 or 6 times faster then then when being economic with fuel. As your enemy I would consider this a great strategy for you to follow.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 30, 2020 8:02:52 GMT -6
Interestingly one US Airship the K-74 was shot down by a U-Boat the U-134 and one crew memmber died, and this Airship was lost because it closed into gun range of a surfaced U-Boat and proved vulnerable to gunfire. Historically by the end of the WW1 airships were unsurvivable in the face of heavier than aircraft, at the start of the war there had been a window were the height they could reach and the limitations of aircraft meant they were viable as weapons of war but better aircraft and better weapons for aircraft meant that they could no longer operate in any area which was in range of hostile aircraft. Hence their last use by the US as ASW surveillance in US Coastal waters, the US did not try to use blimps for long range recon against the Japanese because of that vulnerability. As for ASM Platforms , most ASM's have a reach of less than a hundred miles, the longest ranged reach about 300 it is unbelievable that a Blimp could survive to reach a range of a hundred miles against a carrier's fighters , long range bombers had problems doing that. Then there is launching a rocket from a blimp, you would have to drop it and ignite the engine after release as I suspect very few people would willingly be on the blimp if the rocket was ignited on the hull plus the missiles weighed too much until the advent of light ASM's like Harpoon and Exocet and those were very short ranged. Hindenburg a large airship of good design and using Hydrogen for maximum lift had a useful lift weight of about 10000kg (wikipedia) an SS-N-2 Styx the first effective ASM had a weight of 2500kg, you could cut some of that for an air launched missile as it has height to start off with but then you need to increase the range a lot , so not many missiles per blimp. Then the Blimps need someone to provide over the horizon targeting to launch the attack not easy even today. So we need to attack a worthwhile target a fleet of Dozens of attack blimps which avoid detection and then survice to fight another day against jet fighters 5 or 6 times faster then then when being economic with fuel. As your enemy I would consider this a great strategy for you to follow. Once the U-boats received radar, the airship was doomed. The airship was also a heavy maintenance item along with having to have helium replenishment. All, in all, they were nice but not real effective as technology advanced. The buildings that house them were awesome. We had one at NAS North Island.
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Post by archelaos on Aug 31, 2020 0:53:47 GMT -6
Once the U-boats received radar, the airship was doomed. The airship was also a heavy maintenance item along with having to have helium replenishment. All, in all, they were nice but not real effective as technology advanced. The buildings that house them were awesome. We had one at NAS North Island. Well, I heard some suggestions that rigid airships should be revived. The idea was to cover upper part with solar panels and use the electricity to power engines and get eco friendly carry capacity comparable to big jets.
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Post by andrewm on Aug 31, 2020 3:30:47 GMT -6
Indeed there have been a number of suggestions for reusing modern LTA for cargo carrying importantly so far none of these have been a) Economically viable(a couple of ongoing projects may change that, they have a useful combination of fairlyheavy lift, low operating costs and VTOL) They are NEVER going to replace passanger airlines over any distance because no sane person is going to spend 50+ hours crossing the Atlantic) b) Opposed by Jet fighters. The last makes a combat Blimp suicidal, I would not have been keen on being on a Bear looking for a CVN Group , not even the KGB would have got me on a Blimp looking for a CVN group. I think Zeppelins are cool, so do many people which is why alternate history is full of them. For military purposes they are largely useless by 1918 and totally useless by 1945. If you go the HG Wells/Space 1899 route and have super airships which can actually be flying battleships they would work and that would be a fun game and really intersting mod for this game. (Space 1899 and Catalyst games Leviathans and several other games I can't remember) But without that magic technology Blimps are slow , easily detectable and dead in a war
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Post by andrewm on Aug 31, 2020 4:38:51 GMT -6
Sorry double post
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Post by oldpop2000 on Aug 31, 2020 7:27:48 GMT -6
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Post by brygun on Sept 1, 2020 15:39:56 GMT -6
Im in favor of airships getting some sort of ASW
One aspect of ASW is to warn other ships that an area had a sub in it. If an airship sees a sub it tells the merchant traffic to turn away for a few days.
Less effective is that an airship might patrol ahead of a merchant route or convoy to see that the subs aren't on the surface. A sub might go underwater and wait but a lot of the times the subs have to move at speed, meaning on the surface, to get into attack position. This then of making them go under reduces their effectiveness. Pre-radar night time intercepts aren't affected save of course that it is also that much harder for a sub to be given long distance information updates too.
Also consider late WW2 "milch cow" where an attack u-boat meets with a supply u-boat. These would soon get messed up by long range planes (our game's flying boats). An airship operating in the area could also interrupt this. Things like fuel line hook ups and moving those huge torpedoes up and down narrow hatches took hours of on the surface time. Diving amid a resupply was likewise a problem as you literally might have a torpedo halfway in a hatch when the depth bombs start dropping.
Airships actually damaging a sub is iffy but remember we allow 200 ton corvettes to have an ASW score. I don't think a single airship would have a high ASW score.
I would also suggest that on an overcast day an airship, or risk of airship, would be spooky as compared to airplanes airships are relatively silent. In the pre-radar-on-subs days its possible an airship might keep dropping below and back into overcast clouds for surprise looks.
Consider also how a many days patrol airship could float around acting as a local radio direction finder. Here it doesnt have to even see the sub but report on getting "Enemy transmissions" in the area. These many days airship that existed are not properly modeled by the RTW2 airships out of a base and back again patrols.
Subs are also prone to mission ended due to otherwise light damage that they can't themselves repair, like a periscope. (flashbacks to sooooo many submarine games going RTB from a broken scope). Fuel leaks in some cases can also mean abandoning the sub due to failure to get home from long range raids.
My recommendation would be that each Airship >base< get a few ASW points added to the airplane total. Each base IIRC fields 8 airships. So collectively the airship group can be seen as doing daytime spotting or later radar spotting subs but not so good at attacking.
Query on how many early flying boats (not squadrons but plane count) are needed for 1 or 2 ASW points.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Sept 1, 2020 15:50:01 GMT -6
..... Query on how many early flying boats (not squadrons but plane count) are needed for 1 or 2 ASW points. SearchTheory.pdf (69.49 KB)This is an operations research document into the ASW search patterns for U-boats into the Bay of Biscay. This should answer your question.
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Post by brygun on Sept 1, 2020 15:52:13 GMT -6
..... Query on how many early flying boats (not squadrons but plane count) are needed for 1 or 2 ASW points. This is an operations research document into the ASW search patterns for U-boats into the Bay of Biscay. This should answer your question. Thanks I;ll look at that. To be more specific, in RTW2 how many early float planes are needed for 1 or 2 points of ASW? An air base being 8 airships and them somewhat less effective would then suggest 1 or 2 ASW for the airship base.
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Post by oldpop2000 on Sept 1, 2020 16:10:42 GMT -6
This is an operations research document into the ASW search patterns for U-boats into the Bay of Biscay. This should answer your question. Thanks I;ll look at that. To be more specific, in RTW2 how many early float planes are needed for 1 or 2 points of ASW? An air base being 8 airships and them somewhat less effective would then suggest 1 or 2 ASW for the airship base. Good question. Another source of information about aircraft and convoy escort - www.ibiblio.org/hyperwar/USN/ref/ASW-Convoy/ASW-Convoy-5.html
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