Some questions about flying-boats and hangar-cruisers

[ApalmSWE]

1.Before and during WW2 it was common for larger warships like cruisers, battleships and sometimes even submarines to carry flying-boats for recon. will this be in the game? I have seen that there is flying-boats in the game.

2. I don't think this will be in the game but will it be possible to add hangar-cruisers to the game(moding maybe)? A hangar-cruisers is were cruisers designed to carry a number of aircraft to use for recon and to attack enemy ships/aircraft. They weren't that common but they still existed for example the Swedish hangar-cruiser "HMS Gotland" is could carry around 8 aircraft.

 

[ApalmSWE]

Here is a picture of her, she was a marvellous pice of Swedish engineering

 

[Vidkjaer]

Flyingboats for recon will most likely be modelled in the surface detection stat of the ship.

 

[Denkt]

You can mod in ships that can carry aircrafts while also have the abilities of cruiser.

 

[safe-keeper]

Here is a picture of her, she was a marvellous pice of Swedish engineering

Yes, I hear this is one of the ships that didn't capsize on her way out of harbour .

 

[ApalmSWE]

You can mod in ships that can carry aircrafts while also have the abilities of cruiser.

Thanks now I will be able to sleep in peace

 

[Antediluvian Monster]

Major problem with ship-borne floatplanes is that they were very difficult to recover since it required the mothership coming to halt* and mild sea condition. Hence the planes often had to be ditched after mission, or flown to friendly base if one was nearby. That poses some challanges in regards to modelling them as regular aircraft since floatplanes should suffer significant attrition and be launched very sparingly (as opposed to typical launch patterns of carriers).

If limitations of floatplanes can't be modelled they are better represented as abstract search value bonuses.

*To emphasise, this is in an era where warships typically cruised at around 18-20+ knots while doing evasive zig-zagging even when there was no known enemy about due to submarine threat.

 

[Director]

The Imperial Japanese Navy made excellent use of the Tone-class cruisers. They carried 8" guns forward and reserved the aft for reconnaissance seaplanes. So Japanese carriers could reserve their aircraft for strikes whereas the US carriers had to use strike planes (SBDs) for recon. US ships carried floatplanes, but rarely used them.

 

[Loke]

Yea Gotlands a nice ship. Here you have the Guiseppe Miraglia who carried 17 aircraft and she participated in 3 Wars - 2nd Italo-Abyssynian War, the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

 

[Axe99]

I'm also keen on modding in the seaplane cruisers, seaplane carriers/tenders and the Barnegat class of small seaplane tender (by the look of it, a floating seaplane base that was fairly handily armed), but it'll depend a lot on how sensible it is to mod them in the context of how the game will treat them, and the evolution of seaplane operations during the period.

At the very least, a lot of the RN seaplanes on cruisers were removed in 1941/42, and I don't know why yet, but I'd suspect the advent of radar or the improvements in aircraft carriers rendered them obsolete. Similarly, the Gotland was converted into an AA cruiser in (I think) 1943, and the number of Barnegat's initially ordered was reduced (with others being converted to MTB tenders). The Giuseppe Miraglia apparently spent most of WW2 as a training ship in home waters (and was classified as an aircraft transport ship for the period).

On the other hand, the Italian BBs had specially modified catapult-launched fighters (not floatplanes, so needed to fly to land or ditch in the sea and recover a la the hurricanes on Catapult Assisted Merchants or HMS Pegasus(I think, memory a little hazy)), which would also be 'nice' to mod in, but again it'll depend a lot on whether it's possible to model a ship as 'you can take off from here, but you can't land again'. Most definitely not essential either, just 'nice' if workable.

As Antediluvian well notes, they wouldn't be able to operate all the time (which is one of the reasons I'm keen to mod them in, as opposed to have some kind of fixed search bonus, because a fixed search bonus would imply an always-up, regardless of the weather, recon capability), and this might be quite tricky to model with the AI. We also don't know the impact of having one aircraft up in a sea region on recon, and whether it will be sensible or not.