Hairog
Posts: 1645
Joined: 7/11/2000 From: Cornucopia, WI Status: offline
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The facts speak for themselves. Out of all the carriers and surface ships vying the oceans in WWII only 2 allied carriers did not evade and were sunk by gunfire. The situational awareness of a properly commanded carrier group made it almost impossible for it to be caught off guard by a superior surface force. quote:
If a carrier could be engaged by a surface ship. Very true statement, but any carrier force commander worth his salt would not and did not let it happen. quote:
On the way through the Norwegian Sea the funnel smoke from Glorious and her two escorting destroyers, Acasta and Ardent, was spotted by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau (part of Operation Juno) at about 15:46 pm.[Note 3] The British spotted the German ships shortly after 16:00 and Ardent was dispatched to investigate. Glorious did not alter course or increase speed. Five Swordfish were ordered to the flight deck and Action Stations were ordered 16:20. No combat air patrol was being flown, no aircraft were ready on the deck for quick take-off and there was no lookout in Glorious's crow's nest. Underscore added by me. Basically the commander of the Glorious TF did just about everything wrong that you can do to get a carrier sunk by a battleship. In all of World War II this is the one time that a carrier commander (who was a former submariner by the way) did most everything wrong and got caught. The Gambier Bay: quote:
Meanwhile, the Japanese threw their entire fleet against American naval power in a desperate gamble to destroy the large concentration of American shipping in Leyte Gulf. Powerful Japanese forces—composed of carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers—attempted to converge on the Philippines in a three-pronged attack to the south, center, and north. The Japanese Southern Force met disaster before dawn on 25 October as it tried to drive through Surigao Strait to join the Center Force off Leyte Gulf. While steaming through the Sibuyan Sea en route to the San Bernardino Strait on 24 October, the Center Force was hit hard by hundreds of planes from the carriers of Admiral William "Bull" Halsey′s 3rd Fleet. After the Battle of Sibuyan Sea, Admiral Halsey no longer considered the Center Force a serious threat, and he sent the carriers north to intercept decoy carriers of the Japanese Northern Force off Cape Engaño. quote:
The departure of Halsey's carriers left the escort carriers of "Taffy 3" as the only ships guarding the area around Samar. American commanders were unaware of night-time movement of the Japanese Center Force toward Samar. However, shortly after sunrise on 25 October, a gap in the morning mist disclosed the pagoda-like masts of enemy battleships and cruisers on the northern horizon. So once again a major mistake by a commander and this time the Gambier Bay was truly in the wrong place at the right time. CV are not immune. You could get a lucky computer generated random number and score big time. However, like real life, the chances are that the carrier will evade just like a real TF would. You surly are not proposing that we ignore statistics and probability in order to model a situation that very, very, very rarely occured. 100% of the time that a Strike Task Force set out to engage a Fast Carrier Task Force it failed, everytime. quote:
So instead of making something a waste of time, try to recreate the proper circumstances within the bounds of the game engine. Recreating the proper circumstances within the bounds of the game engine is exactly what I have done. By adding the naval zones of control and the defensive evasion capabilities (both of which Hubert designed into the game) we have recreated the historic situation. In World War Two it was a waste of time to try and engage a properly commanded Fast Carrier Task Force with surface forces. The Naval Readme does warn you of what the probable outcome would be. This was much more than the real commanders of WWII knew. At the begining of the war the Battleship was seen, by most military minds, as the ultimate weapon. Reality proved this was not the case, but most did not know this. People who read the Readme had a headsup. The zones of control reacreate the fact that Taskforces did not blithly sail by each other without engaging. Just didn't happen. I could not find one instance where two enemy task forces were within gun range, ignored each other and did not spend significant time and resourses shooting at each other. This was true no matter how large or small they were relative to each other. They still went at it. One of the only times a task force was virtually ignored was Halsey and The Center Force that Taffy 3 encountered. Many carriers that were sunk, were sunk by submarine but the vast majority were crippled or sunk by aircraft. In the Naval Mod, submarines are an excellent way to damage a carrier.
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WW III 1946 Books SC3 EAW WW Three 1946 Mod and Naval Mods WarPlan and WarPlan Pac Alpha and Be
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