However, according to a reference book authored & published by Americans that I have around here somewhere, by the end of the war the RN, by introducing permanent stowage of a/c on deck (as all modern USN CV's do), were able to carry just as many a/c as the USN CV's.

All  the authors I've read always cite the lack of armored flight decks as a point of greatly increased vulnerability in WWII while also noting the trade-off in increased displacement, a disadvantage which largely disappeared once the various Naval Treaties expired.

Good point about torps. And that's exactly how the IJN Taiho met her fate, armored flight deck & all, w/o ever even launching a strike. In this case though, I've read that it was the inexperience of the Damage Control Officer that & his incompetent decisions that finally doomed the ship.

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On Thursday, June 4, 2020, 08:55:36 AM MST, Ethan McKinney <xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:

The armored flight decks are widely considered to be a disastrous design decision. They carried far fewer aircraft because of it, and plane handling was much slower. As a result, American carriers could conduct far better searches while still hurling bigger strikes AND maintaining a real CAP. Once the USN had all-folding-wing air groups and rebalanced the air group with two fighter squadrons, they were extremely dangerous.

It's worth noting how big a danger torpedoes were to carriers (and the Bismarck). An armored deck does nothing to protect against them, and often makes you more vulnerable to capsizing after a torpedo hit.

Ethan

On Thu, Jun 4, 2020, 06:26 Thomas RUX <xxxxxx@comcast.net> wrote:
Hello all,

This reminds me of the Battle of Jutland. Reading about the battle and seeing a couple of documentaries one conclusion for the loss of so many RN ships was the gun crews failed to follow Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) leaving hatches open to the powder magazines. Then we have WW II when the USN carriers went to sea with unarmored flight decks even though there was good evidence from both the British and Japanese that armored filght decks were a good idea.

Tom Rux
On June 3, 2020 at 8:44 PM xxxxxx@gmail.com wrote:

This is interesting. A deniable strike to punish either a greedy noble or a greedy corporation or the like. Nice!

The one thing that would make this even more reasonable as a scenario would be this:

If everyone is in the middle of active fighting, they're going to know very quickly that this omission is a glaring gaff. Hell is going to be raised right then and there.

If, on the other hand, these ships were built in peacetime, and nobody really had figured they'd have to go into main line of battle anytime soon (show the flag, chase pirates, hammer smaller vessels, etc. but no serious fleet actions with similar sized classes), then the shortcoming, while known to the crews, might not be as big of a deal as long as none of the ships of the class got gutted by a hostile combatant.

Then along comes a real fight, bang goes the ship with the scion, and now you have 'the ancient Rite of Canly' as Duke Leto Atreides would have called it.

Something like that might make the omission's existence for a long period sort of 'it ought to be there, but the ship still does okay in its uses' during peacetime followed by.... real fights and real heavy damage or ship losses.

TomB

On Wed, Jun 3, 2020 at 11:14 PM Ethan McKinney < xxxxxx@gmail.com> wrote:
Ken Burnside asked me to post this:

While kvetching about the canonical lack of Meson Screens on certain classes of warships I have to make scenarios around for Squadron Strike: Traveller... I came up with the idea for a campaign arc. I bounced it off of my Traveller line developer ( Michael Llaneza ) and...
We got this: Justice by Design A doctrinal error by the Imperial Navy has led to the death of a scion of a noble family. The gallant young officer went down fighting in the finest traditions of the Imperial navy, but might have survived victorious if their ship had been equipped with a meson screen. It was supposed to. Despite the master construction plans and bills of material clearly stating “put a Mk8 Meson Screen in this compartment”, those compartments were used for PO berthing on every single vessel in the class equipped for a humaniti-majority crew (Vegan Confederation destroyers of this class used it for a high-humidity rec area). Someone made an ungodly sum of money on this deception. Someone highly placed, able to interfere with the distribution of construction blueprints for a major class of Imperial warship to dozens or hundreds of naval yards.  These people will pay in blood and in the destruction of all their works. The contract specifies seven generations worth of damage. Every effort will be made to provide (deniable) assets as required. You have been offered the job. What do you do?

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