I saw a lot of stuff, but this article still surprised me. I believed the British had begun to prefer normal carrier planes over seaplanes / amphibians long before 1936.
So unless you have missed the entire "sea control ship" idea of the 70's and the ever-recurring proposals for smallish carriers, you should recognise this as a very old published proposal from the very same lineage. It's one of the technical ideas which refuse to die, kind of like death rays, rail guns, maglev, hypersonic planes or moon colonies.
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3000 tons; and i thought the 10,000 tons Giuseppe Garibaldi was small! The next smallest one that I came across was the IJN Hōshō at < 7500 tons.
ReplyDeleteThe caption says 'propose': was it ever built or that was an artist's concept drawing ?
I never liked the idead of dedicated seaplane carriers (like the Foudre or the HMAS Albatross.) If one plans to operate a small number of seaplanes, it would not be good enough to have them assigned to cruisers and battleships instead (e.g. DKM Admiral Graf Spee)?
Charles_in_Houston_Texas
I don't see a real mission for it either and I doubt it would have had good-enough endurance and roll stability at this displacement.
Delete"Pocket" eh? They liked those buzzwords even back in 1936. Isn't it just a glorified seaplane tender? So much marketing, ...here and now it's amusing to see this.
DeleteLCS of its day... ;-)
ReplyDeleteHow would this have worked during its time? A seaplane replenishment ship at sea that extends the operational radius of seaplanes (armed with torpedos?).
ReplyDeleteSorry, but I see no stupidity, just a concept of limited ambitions and costs for overwatching the sea.
It was probably more a ploy to sell the aircraft than to sell the ship idea.
DeleteOne reasonable purpose could have been anti-submarine patrols between Scotland and Norway, though. It was a traditional cordon area to limit German submarine operations (it was even mined with a huge minefield during the First World War).
Remember the British attempted to use fleet carriers for ASW (HMS Courageous etc.) in that region during early 1940.
The concept doesn't seem too far away from the actual aircraft carrying merchantmen used in convois.
ReplyDeleteLook at the German surface fleet, would they have benefitted if their supply ships also provided a range extension for their floatplanes? And even have these floatplanes lightly armed to strike at lone targets?
Instead of laughing at each scrapped idea on its own, one might create an overview of the proposed ideas and look at the pattern of picked solutions. What do we know about the idea picking process and its effect? Would a different idea picking process have served better? Why did people who specialized in a subject have this specific idea picking process?