Medium/heavy naval bombers?

[davewolf]

The German air tech tree shows the following naval bombers: Do-22 -> Arado-196 -> Fw-300 -> Me-262

First of all, the Fw-300 doesn't fit it in there. It doesn't make much sense to jump from the - pre-war- single engine Arado-196 to the - never actually built - four-engine Fw-300 and back to the fighter/bomber Me-262.

Secondly, except for the Fw-300 they're all rather light aircraft. The kind that could be based on ships. Does that mean they're all short range with small payloads?

If so, what about medium to heavy naval bombers, like the ones that sunk the Prince of Wales & Repulse: Mitsubishi G4M + G3M? Can tactical bombers adequately perform such missions? Or is that simply a missing piece of the puzzle?

 

[tom_jones]

First of all, the Fw-300 doesn't fit it in there. It doesn't make much sense to jump from the - pre-war- single engine Arado-196 to the - never actually built - four-engine Fw-300 and back to the fighter/bomber Me-262.

The FW-300 actually seems to be something different than the real design -- the icon depicts it as another small aircraft like the ones predating it and completely unlike the real thing, and it has apparently option to develop it as carrier-based ship, like all other units in the fighter tree. So yeah, given they're all in the "fighter" branch i'd expect it to be some sort of a light aircraft like the rest of them.

 

[afghanrabbit]

Your on to something here. I think there should be naval variants of medium and heavy bombers just like there are for the fighters and close air support aircraft. Obviously this wouldn't be for landing them on a carrier but rather to have them sea attack oriented instead of land attack focused only. This would help all nations as Germany could reach further into the Atlantic while Japan operated from their island bases. The Allies on the other hand could use them against u-boats and other axis shipping. I really like this idea and there is historical president for it.


What about it @podcat ?

 

[Zbyszk0]

Aren't the names in the tech tree purely cosmetic? I imagine it would be pretty easy to mod in whichever pictures and names you like.

Also you can create variants of your naval bombers to focus their abilities ... namely range and firepower in this instance.

 

[tom_jones]

I went to look at the most recent WWW recording, and it appears the tactical bombers also can be assigned mission to attack ports. So it'd seem while they cannot attack ships out on the sea like the naval bombers and CAS aircraft can, they can at least damage units docked in ports (along with naval infrastructure)

 

[LordOfWar16]

They could simply use the Fw-200 condor, also known as "Scourge of the Atlantic" as it was called by Winston Churchill. It scouted the enemy convoys for the submarines and attacked them well outside of allied fighter range. It was so dangerous that it was one of the reasons, if not the reason, the allied came up with the CAM (catapult aircraft merchant ship) ships, which used a rocket-proppeled catapult launching hawker hurricane fighters to combat the fw200 condor. Overall, its not like germany had much carriers to conduct air-based convoy raiding from.

It was claimed that in under an year from june 1940 to febuary 1941 the fw-200 sank over 331,122 tonnes (365.000 tons) of shipping.