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No ones ever made that comment when referencing Warspite or Hood's looks. In Warspites case she was quite long in the tooth.To be fair, your Vengeance is pretty long-in-tooth by now....
The comment is directed less towards her aesthetic appeal, and more to the conundrum of both ships coexisting; the RAN has retired it's WWI era ships, and the RCN is eyeing the retirement of it's own contemporary WWI battle cruisers, surely such discussions are happening in the Lantean admiralty.
Would there be any objections to me retrospectively adding some Australian trainers like the Wirraway and Wackett?
Foxy does seem to have neglected the training fleet apart from some Tiger Moths and a few hand-me-down fighters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAC_Wackett
I have not yet fully decided whether I will split the New Zealand-based aircraft into the OTL RNZAF, which seems logical, or as a wing of the RAAF.
Bombers
100 Bristol Buckingham, in service since 1941, Foxy had posted an RFP for a longer-ranged replacement as early as 1942 but it never came to pass and I have no idea what he was planning. They remain in service. It would be logical to assume that the RAAF would have acquired heavy bombers as it did OTL but the attack/bombing fleet seems optimised for Army support. I'm open to thoughts here. I'd love a fleet of Lincolns or something but not sure how feasible that is.
190 BCAC Type 162 Bathurst, 1944, acquired in 3 variants, torpedo-bomber (replacing Albacore), reconnaissance with ASV and seaplane (replacing Curtiss Seagull). Foxy indicated 190 were brought, apparently to replace the Albacore and Dauntless, but the seaplanes would replace Seagulls and not Dauntlesses, so there is a shortfall. In any case the Bathurst is a dated design but anything much bigger won't fit on the smaller hybrids.
I might acquire some heavier torpedo bombers for Enterprise & Endeavour and leave these to solider on in recon and seaplane roles.
Transports
Foxy never outlined any transport aircraft at all. I have assumed licence-built DH.84 Dragons for transport and to serve as navigation and radio operator trainers. These will need replacing and the best candidate is the DHA-3 Drover which in WW entered service around 1946.
I am loathe to retconn too many British equipment sales to Australia so I'm focusing on home-built items and keeping everything reasonably modest.
I have not yet fully decided whether I will split the New Zealand-based aircraft into the OTL RNZAF, which seems logical, or as a wing of the RAAF.
Foxy was always sceptical of flying boats but given the terrain and nature of New Guinea I think more should have been brought.
I might acquire some heavier torpedo bombers for Enterprise & Endeavour and leave these to solider on in recon and seaplane roles.
10 (?) Australian Aviation AA-39 Monarch, airship fighter, given small number I might just replace with more CF-14s
126 (?) De Havilland Canada CF-14 Monarch, airship fighters, delivered with the additional airships Canada has supplied and listed by Shin on the encyclopedia.
My kneejerk reaction for a lot of this is "buy Canadian", which generally falls in line with my overall feeling that the Commonwealth should be pursuing commonality whenever feasible, but I also want to make sure I don't default to Canadian too much simply because of my own bias. Another thing to consider is both Canada and Oz had fairly close ties with the US, and Oz tended to have more American products in their aviation stable than Canada.
I'm in favor of a separate New Zealand Air Force and Army, but ones that closely coordinates and to some degree are subservient to the larger Australian branches. In many ways, those branches are easier to do so with than the Navy, so I don't see a compelling argument for them not to be nominally independent for national pride purposes, at the very least. The general idea is that the locals are best at deciding what to do locally for the day-to-day operations, but they answer to Oz/the Crown on what they're expected to contribute to the larger whole in strategic terms.
This is the first I've heard of Foxy's skepticism towards flying boats, and is in fact rather perplexing considering how much of his fleet seems dedicated to supporting seaplane operations.
I think I mentioned this privately, but I'm currently planning on pairing up each of the hybrid carriers with one of the regular carriers, and varying their squadrons to complement each other; the hybrid being a gunline escort and fighter/scout specialist to the larger carriers handling heavier strike packages.
The DHC CF-14s would more rightly be CAC-35s if we're pursuing our original intent with those being Australian designs through Foxy's pursuit of the Miles line. I was only having DHC produce them because after we went through the trouble of putting that project together for him, he flat out refused them. DHC would likely produce some to replacing the aging CF-8s for Canadian service, but the design would originate from Oz. I also believe we'd floated the CAC-35 as a carrier-based fighter being suited for those short RAN decks.
I'm not sure how the AA-39 came about. Foxy lists it based on the M39 as an airship fighter, but I believe the M35 (CAC-35/DHC-14) is a better platform for that purpose.
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