>I was thinking more the other way around- Kongou has two
>"cousin classes", the Queen Elizabeth and Revenge
>Battlecruisers, all designed by George Thurston, who I'd imagine would
>be quite keen on having as much data from all his "girls" as possible,
>in order to fix anything that might crop up between the designs. Of
>course, with 14 ships between the 3 classes, that'd probably be a
>never-ending conga line through the dry docks as the engineers kept
>tinkering with the plans.

Naval architecture in general has presumably taken some interesting turns in that setting, given how different military aviation is. For instance, although the Fusō navy has full-size fleet carriers (configured to support both conventional aircraft and Striker-equipped witches), the much smaller footprint, VSTOL capability, and lack of a need to store large quantities of volatile aviation fuel means that - like a great many ships in the WWII era had facilities for a small seaplane or two - virtually any ship can be configured to support at least one or two witches. That's more or less what I had in mind when I mentioned that the convoy Mogami was part of had a witch component, though in that particular battle's case they were stymied by the weather.

What that means is that the aviation cruiser and aviation battleship, concepts that never really worked in the real world - warships with heavily armed gun turrets forward of the superstructure and a miniature flight deck aft, like the Ise class - suddenly become not only viable, but potentially really significant weapons. They never really worked in real life because they either had to carry float planes, which can't compete with anything that has retractable gear in aerial combat, or else could only launch their normal aircraft, not recover them. They were a classic example of a Swiss army knife with too many blades.

Replace those bulky, cumbersome, unrecoverable aircraft with Striker Units, though, and you have a ship that actually can function as a battleship and a full-service carrier. They could station the equivalent of an entire JFW aboard such a vessel easily, which is a big stick indeed in a world where conventional naval firepower is virtually useless by itself. (They never did anything much with the obvious possibility of naval gunfire supporting witch operations, unfortunately. In the anime, with only one exception I can think of, whenever warships appear, it's just to blunder around and accomplish fuckall until the witches show up and do all the actual work. Combined arms isn't really something the writers were interested in exploring, I guess. :)

Unfortunately, the European war is not one in which naval aviation plays a terribly big part - not for nothing was the Pacific Theater the one where all the carrier glory days happened in the real war - so there's not really a lot of point to this other than as an interesting thought experiment, but it seems to me that given the above, the IFN wouldn't have abandoned the BBV/CAV concept as readily as the Japanese did.

None of which has anything at all to do with the Kongō class, although it's likely that they do have provision aboard for a Striker or two. (In one ep of the TV series, we saw that Yamato does, and the real Kongō class could carry a couple of float planes for recon.) We didn't see any of them stationed at HMNB Folkestone as yet, but Shizuka did say that some of the fleet was out.

--G.
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Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
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