General Social/Chatter Thread

[The Rock Doctor]

Any particular reason one couldn't make an armored box flight deck cruiser?

It would be weird, no question.  But you've got stuff on the outside of the box in full-length box carriers.

There are probably solid technical reasons not to do it - lots of weight high forward or aft, rather than amidships, etc.

But from a strictly SS perspective, it isn't terrible.  Halving the airgroup for the flight-deck design is not terrible because all that armor doesn't allow for the weight of a full air group anyway.

On the other hand, if you consider a flight deck cruiser the bastard offspring of a cruiser and a carrier, an armored box flight deck cruiser probably just makes things worse.  I got a quad 150mm, 24 planes, 32 knots, 100mm belt and 100mm deck on...19,000 tonnes.  I can absolutely build a full light cruiser and a light carrier (albeit not as well protected) on that.

[Kaiser Kirk]

Theoretically it could be done.

It's not actually covered, so figuring out how to merge the two types might take some consideration.

I think the weight cost would wind up being close to prohibitive, but one could try.

There's already a couple clarifications want to add to the flight-deck cruiser rules,
- basically the rule as written has you dedicate either the aft half, or the fore half to the hanger & flight deck, but that was in fact meant to be a concept place holder.

That said, it fails to say you could move the amidships point to model different flight deck lengths, it doesn't say you can't, but that's relevant.

Also, that elevated area was either fore, or aft - as modeled - or amidships.
It's not clear in the text that you model it one way, and then state in the text what the actual arrangement is.

The reason was in SS, modeling Amidships is hard - you needed either aft deck or fore deck at 'normal freeboard'.
For a 'cruiser' you want a normal-freeboard height deck to place your main battery on,
so you do not 'pay' for an extra height Barbette, or get penalized in the stability/recoil formula.

Another thing on my 'I should do that' is round up the various flight deck lengths I've seen mentioned as needed for various planes. For example. the RN for the MAC wanted 140m @ 15knot for landing and takeoff as a minimum. But if you are willing to alternate, you can manage less - they settled for 120m as a minimum- but that was also to launch a Swordfish torpedo plane, so a fighter should be able to do less. I know my US Cruiser book lists a couple lengths, and discussions on CVEs also include some lengths.