ny59giants
Posts: 9869
Joined: 1/10/2005 Status: offline
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American CVs - OK, we know the air capacity is 90, but you can overstack up to 99 planes and still conduct full air ops. From the beginning, I tend to make mine fighter heavy through '42 with an additional Marine fighter group of 18 planes (36 F, 18 x 2 SBD, 15 Avengers = 87 planes). In July '42 when the fighters go up to 36 planes, I don't fill out that many fighters so I can keep the additional Marine fighter group on board, but add extra pilots that can be trained up. An option that may need to consider depending on operations planned is to remove the 15 plane Avenger groups and add in those Marines in '43 (36 Navy fighter planes, 36 SBD, and 18 Marine fighters = 90 planes). You can divide an Avenger group or another Marine fighters group to add 5 TBs or 6 more fighters. So, you can have 60 fighters per CV vs the normal 36 that your opponent may be expecting. Having about 150 additional fighters on say 6 CVs may be the difference. IMO, for most of '43 you want survivability of your CVs and being able to keep them where the action is vs them spending 6 months at Pearl repairing 2 TT hits. With your Hellcats and later the carrier version of the Corsair coming out, your CVs may need less and less extra fighters as the year ends. By '44, you should be able to go back to having more strike planes (DBs and TBs) to truly go after KB.
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