WesWorld

In the 1920's there appeared to be three categories of naval aviation; lighter-than air (LTA), seaplanes, and carrier launched a/c.
LTA had basic weaknesses but could have been adapted.
Right now in WesWorld we are seeing a lot of ships capable of supporting seaplanes being developed.
Seaplanes had the potential for high performance - look at the racing seaplanes.
Suppose at some point naval planners felt that the carrier was an extremely expensive concept and the ship itself was very vulnerable. The aircraft were space/weight limited. They decided instead to improve the performace of the various classes of seaplanes.
What would a naval force 10 years later be like?
How would this focus on seaplanes have affected other naval aviation development?

You'd still need to solve the drag problem and weight problems for payloads. That and the ability to manuever with floats. and while this last one won't be a problem for many year.....how do you build jet floatplanes that are supersonic and can carry the load of say a F-14 Tomcat ("Chicken" I believe they call it on the carriers).

You need a couple of things;
- hugely powerful engines, which in turn require either excessive overloading of one float with fuel, or contra-rotating props.

- need for long range, which leads to bigger aeroplane, so more powerful engines needed

- floatplanes aren't that seaworthy, so flying boats are better. It is possible to design a clean flying boat hull,but difficult.

With jet engines it becomes a lot easier;



From 1943-44

Type: SR.A/1
Function: fighter
Year: 1947 Crew: 1 Engines: 2 * 1746kg Metropolitan-Vickers F2/4 Beryl
Wing Span: 14.02m Length: 15.24m Height: 5.11m Wing Area: 38.60m2
Empty Weight: 5108kg Max.Weight: 8633kg
Speed: 824km/h Ceiling: Range:
Armament: 4*g20mm

Its fast and fairly long-ranged, but why bother when you have carriers?

Good question, John.

I know very little about seaplanes, but think Ithekro raises a valid point about drag. A seaplane's float causes drag, adds weight, should impair its handling, etc. Racing seaplanes may in some cases address these issues well, but I also have to wonder if they are simply sturdy enough to undertake military service. Built for racing, I expect them to be cramped, lightweight machines that won't hold up well to repeated use or damage. Of course, I could be wrong on all this.

But if seaplanes were to be more widely adopted, I think you'd still be stuck with the same categories - carrier or land (well, shore)-based - that you are with wheeled aircraft. After all, you still need somewhere to repair the aicraft, store the spares, fuel and ordnance, house the pilot, and so on. If you want to operate well away from land, you also need a conveyance, the carrier, to get you there. How I'd visualize that carrier: a faster version of Commodore Teste, with a number of catapults to let you launch your air group quickly.

Question: when a seaplane is recovered, does the mothership slow or come to a stop? If so, I'd lean towards two smaller (less expensive, faster deceleration and acceleration) carriers than one large one...

Would it replace the conventional carrier? I doubt it - more likely it's a way for nations to add to their naval strike capability in conjunction with conventional flat-tops.

One reason I raised this issue was that the USN had a jet seaplane fighter and a 4 jet seaplane bomber (their counter to the B-47).
I don't know how much drag and other issues effected their design. The fighter use foils and it had a streamlined hull.

The Yanks had a system for retrieving floatplanes during WW2 that involved a boom extended from the side of the ship towing a floating matt that the floatplane taxied onto as the ship made a slow turn to that side to minimise it's wake. The floatplane would "beach" itself on the matt, where small points on the step would hook into the mat allowing the plane to stop it's engine, and to hoisted aboard. The ship didn't have to slow down below about half speed for this process. However the whole process took several minutes, whereas on a carrier, several aircraft could be recovered in the same amount of time. The essesce of carrier warfare is repeated, FREQUENT attacks in as short a period of time as possible over as long a range as possible to prevent retaliatory attacks. If you slow down this turnaround, you lose much of a carrier's effectiveness.

As for catapults, they would actually slow down the launch rate of any carrier borne aircraft up to the start of the jet age. As someone else ( I think it was RA ) stated, if you point your bow into the wind and "floor the loud pedal", all the planes on deck are suddenly doing 50 or kts airspeed BEFORE their wheels start to turn, which is enought to launch to B25's, so the lightweight planes of today (wesworld current time) will fairly leap off the decks.

Floatplanes and flying boats are more suited to operations from land or island bases, due to the slowness of turnaround they are not suited to large scale ship based operations, and as was seen during WW1 and WW2, they were mostly used for recon and anti-sub work. They come into their own for operations form coastal locations that have limited infrastructure (no airports, or land suitable for same,so Swampy should be up to his tonsils in seaplanes at this stage!)

As a final point on flying boats, the single greatest cause of damage to them outside of combat is from floating debris. The little pic RA posted of the SR.A/1 reminded me of an interview on TV with the test pilot, who narrowly escaped with his live when the plane hit a piece of floating debris and did a half "ground" loop and flipped over when it dug in one wing!!!

Having said all that, I intend to have a sizeable flying boat force for Denmark (Iberia has it's airships, so doesn't need them yet!)

Quoted

Originally posted by JohnEStauffer
One reason I raised this issue was that the USN had a jet seaplane fighter and a 4 jet seaplane bomber (their counter to the B-47).
I don't know how much drag and other issues effected their design. The fighter use foils and it had a streamlined hull.

The "Sea Dart" fighter and the "Sea Master" recon bomber were among the fastest aircraft of their day. When you consider that a hydrodynamic hull is AUTOMATICALLY aerodynamic due to the increased density of water, once engines of sufficient power to break the suction of the water, they only issue that killed off the seaplanes was the fact that land based planes could preform "almost" exactly the same mission, be without the danger of losing the plane on landing to hidden debris.

The drag issue is the same for all aircraft. Retractable undercarriages help (tip floats on the PBY5/Catalina), monoplanes did away with the interplane struts and wires of biplanes. Pod mounted engines (RA's current seaplane pet or the rohrbach designs) gave way to wing mounted engines (either pedestal mounted wings as on the PBY5/Catalina or gull wings as on the Beriev designs)
but I have to say, flyingboats are FAR cleaner that floatplanes!

It was thought that land bases (even as late as 1940) would take too long to construct so a float plane fighter was considered viable. Carrier aircraft were small and shorter ranged that their floatplane counterparts and floatplanes could use a longer takeoff (more payload). With low performance aircraft in the 20-30's the mobile seaplane base was seen as a viable alternative to the carrier.

Perhaps the postwar ideas were on the vulnerability of nuclear bomber bases whereas a seaplane could operate from almost anywhere.

Cheers,

There were ideas for seaplane fighters as late as the 70's and 80's due to concerns over airbase vulnerability.

http://www.strange-mecha.com/aircraft/J-Sea/J-Sea.htm

Having effective combat capable seaplanes diversifies the threat. You now have more threats to concern yourself with. A simple air strike on fixe airbases won't necessarily eliminate your offensive potential. A carrier is only part of threat.
Now that the WIG (wing-in-ground) concept seems to be valid we have a new sea based platform that is neither aircraft or ship but has some interesting capabilities.

Ah yes, the "Caspian Sea Monster"!!
That is one scary beast!

I am a strong beliver in seaplanes as ASW, transport and patrol aircrafts. A medium sized seaplane with an effective ASW/AEW suite patroling the fleet which do not have to return to a landbase or an expesive carrier would be nice, for both small navies or small surface groups, just a cruiser and acouple of destroyers. A float plane could be a strong alternative to a large helicopter (Seaking/seahawk)

The fighter idea is interesting but I don't think it would work after the introduction of missles.