Nimitz carrier in WW11
Discussion
Max_Torque said:
Just use excel:
excelenginmamachine
Modern pcs are incredibly powerful!
The "bombe" machines used in the war ran at about 15 calculation loops per second, enormously fast for the time, but even the worst modern pc (single core at 2.5ghz) could do the same calc (integer maths) at a rate of around 300 million times per second!!
Indeed, but another point is that the carrier will have a decent library (and then some). If this really was travel back in the same timeline, the library would contain detailed orders of battle etc. for every single encounter. You wouldn't need to decrypt anything, you could just look it up! excelenginmamachine
Modern pcs are incredibly powerful!
The "bombe" machines used in the war ran at about 15 calculation loops per second, enormously fast for the time, but even the worst modern pc (single core at 2.5ghz) could do the same calc (integer maths) at a rate of around 300 million times per second!!
The library would no doubt also contain the cryptanalysis courses studied by crewmen, so if the timeline did start to diverge you could fall back on doing it the old fashioned way. Just because there's no capability on board wouldn't mean that no-one was taking the course, or could be ordered to!
Knowledge is power, as they say!
kowalski655 said:
The Last Ship is about a plague,not time travel
Its also s
t 
Yeah I know, jeez Its also s
t 
And I also have to take you to task there - I think it's brilliant! Why do you say it's s
t? It's a great brain-out, boys-own adventure series with hilarious characters, stereotypical baddies, guns and huge explosions, and fit birds. What's not to like? it's not meant to be a documentary FFS!Ray Luxury-Yacht said:
kowalski655 said:
The Last Ship is about a plague,not time travel
Its also st
Yeah I know, jeez Its also s
t And I also have to take you to task there - I think it's brilliant! Why do you say it's s
t? It's a great brain-out, boys-own adventure series with hilarious characters, stereotypical baddies, guns and huge explosions, and fit birds. What's not to like? it's not meant to be a documentary FFS!
davepoth said:
I don't know if most of them would even need the arrestor wires - there's a lot of deck to use, she's a pretty fast ship, and the planes of the time would land at 80mph. Steam into any significant wind and you'd be looking at speeds of less than 40mph across the deck.
Nimitz class trial speeds are around 33 knots, so more like 50knots speed across the deck, still feasible though.WW2 US carriers had catapults and arrestor gear, so to some extent are already at least partially compatible, the modern gear would have to be adjusted to minimum power though or you would rip the 1940's airframes apart.
if you came through witout aircraft how about a Doolittle raid writ large - A C-130 Hercules is bigger and heavier than a B-17 flying fortress, and the former can take off and land on a super carrier.
A modern carrier would end WWII in one theatre in a week and then the other in a month.
In the open sea their advantage is that they are basically unapproachable. The carrier groups recon and elint assets mean that it will locate and sink the opposing Navy and any attempt to find it will be shot down a hundred miles out.
There isn't going to be some mass attack of hundreds of propeller planes running the carrier out of missiles.
The second stage will involve the carrier aircraft decapitating the enemy state, and then causing massive infrastructure damage as power, water and the stores that hold spares plus the factories that make original equipment are destroyed.
May be necessary to go through a few generations of heads of state before they get the idea.
If the decapitation doesn't work it will easily swing a war in the favor of the side which has it.
In the open sea their advantage is that they are basically unapproachable. The carrier groups recon and elint assets mean that it will locate and sink the opposing Navy and any attempt to find it will be shot down a hundred miles out.
There isn't going to be some mass attack of hundreds of propeller planes running the carrier out of missiles.
The second stage will involve the carrier aircraft decapitating the enemy state, and then causing massive infrastructure damage as power, water and the stores that hold spares plus the factories that make original equipment are destroyed.
May be necessary to go through a few generations of heads of state before they get the idea.
If the decapitation doesn't work it will easily swing a war in the favor of the side which has it.
IanH755 said:
Anyway, as a single US CV doesn't carry enough non-nuclear weaponry to substantially alter a ground war (if attacking the front lines), personally I'd concentrate my alpha strikes on the IJN carrier force before swapping to either -
1. A long range land attack on various HQ's in Japan looking to decapitate the leadership, although I'm not sure that the intel would be good enough in the history books to be able to pin-point a HQ and the Nimitz doesn't carry any ELINT aircraft in it's modern fit (used to be the ES-3 in the '80s-90s).
You'd expect it to be sucked through time with auxiliaries(and the rest of a carrier battlegroup, so an AEGIS platform or two, 2-3 ASW platforms and an SSN), the fleet train supplying lots of AVCAT along with the bombs, bullets and beans. As noted the arrester gear would need turned down to avoid pulling the tails off lighter WW2 aircraft. Boffins would need to be flown out to the carrier in large numbers to examine the various systems and extract information to reverse engineer the technology.1. A long range land attack on various HQ's in Japan looking to decapitate the leadership, although I'm not sure that the intel would be good enough in the history books to be able to pin-point a HQ and the Nimitz doesn't carry any ELINT aircraft in it's modern fit (used to be the ES-3 in the '80s-90s).
Creating a usable facsimile of AVCAT wouldn't be difficult although the corrosion inhibitors might take a while. I suspect semi-conductors, especially integrated circuits, would be the hardest to reproduce, followed by the nickel superalloys needed for jet engines although they were beginning to emerge as a result of Whittle's work with Wiggins Alloys. In contrast replicating nuclear reactors would just be expensive. In order to avoid bedlam induced by the appearance of this apparently alien technology they would need to be kept out of the way when not actually in action, one of the larger fjords in Alaska perhaps. Honolulu has too many people to keep anything secret at Pearl Harbour.
I know this is all hypthetical, but modern catapults don't work the same way as those of WWII. Even up until the demise of HMS Ark Royal IV we used strops, or bridles, as they were known, attached betweent the aircraft and catapult. Modern US aircraft are fitted with a retractable bar on the nose wheel leg which fits into the catapult shuttle. So if you were to use WWII aircraft, they would have to be launched under their own power.
williamp said:
We are, of course assuming it will join the allied forces. What if if took on the whole world??
The UK, alone, was launching 1000-bomber raids on Germany during WW2. It built over 7000 Lancasters over the course of the war. The US built 12,000 B-17s. Then there were B-29s, B-24s, Mosquitos, Stirlings, Halifaxes ... So any attempt to take on the whole world would rely on the Air Group having sufficient ammunition to knock down anywhere from 1000 to 2000 bombers per raid. That's a pretty tall order - ~40 aircraft with 10 missiles each would knock down 400 bombers, then you need to switch to guns and start taking on individual targets to get through the next 600-1600 bombers (or you land and reload as you would have seen the bomber stream from 250 miles away and thus have time to keep chewing through it, but with bombers converging from different directions your forces are split).
I don't know exactly how many missiles a carrier carries, but I doubt it's 2000+, so there's going to be some guns-only dogfighting involved at some point.
Talksteer said:
A modern carrier would end WWII in one theatre in a week and then the other in a month.
In the open sea their advantage is that they are basically unapproachable. The carrier groups recon and elint assets mean that it will locate and sink the opposing Navy and any attempt to find it will be shot down a hundred miles out.
There isn't going to be some mass attack of hundreds of propeller planes running the carrier out of missiles.
The second stage will involve the carrier aircraft decapitating the enemy state, and then causing massive infrastructure damage as power, water and the stores that hold spares plus the factories that make original equipment are destroyed.
May be necessary to go through a few generations of heads of state before they get the idea.
If the decapitation doesn't work it will easily swing a war in the favor of the side which has it.
That's what I was thinking! The threats to the carrier is pretty none existent! I would hope that it would be able too detect the enemy ships far before the enemy could detect it. So once the carrier has found a target it would deploy the super hornets. carrying either harpoons, Mavericks or paveway LGBs so they could engage the apposing carrier (a single hit to the deck would prevent aircraft taking off / landing - esp with the wooden decks) and or supporting ships long before they had even detected. In the open sea their advantage is that they are basically unapproachable. The carrier groups recon and elint assets mean that it will locate and sink the opposing Navy and any attempt to find it will be shot down a hundred miles out.
There isn't going to be some mass attack of hundreds of propeller planes running the carrier out of missiles.
The second stage will involve the carrier aircraft decapitating the enemy state, and then causing massive infrastructure damage as power, water and the stores that hold spares plus the factories that make original equipment are destroyed.
May be necessary to go through a few generations of heads of state before they get the idea.
If the decapitation doesn't work it will easily swing a war in the favor of the side which has it.
The only threat would be subs, as it carries no anti sub weapon systems. However the fact the ship can do 30 knots would mean that the carrier would probably need to run into the sub to be in danger.
As for the Suoer Hornets, I would remove ALL anti air weapons as they are not needed! The only threat to the hornets would be a head on attack from a Zero. That's highly unlikely and I would hope the hornet pilot could detect and evade well before being in range of the Zero's guns! No point wasting a $100,000 missile on an aircraft that poses little to no threat to you or your carrier!
If there was a direct air attack to the carrier then yes launch every bird you have strapped with every AA missile you had! But I can't see it ever getting to that!
Shar2 said:
So if you were to use WWII aircraft, they would have to be launched under their own power.
You wouldn't do anything else though.....
And it's been done quite a lot in the past few decades for commemorations and filming. They've even flown some B-25's off a modern US carrier a few years back for one of the Doolittle raid celebrations.
IanH755 said:
Harpoons wouldn't be as effective against WW2 Cruisers & Battleships as they are much more heavily armoured than current ships, especially at the waterline, as the armour was designed to defeat AP rounds fired by 8in to 16in cannons with much more explosive power than a single harpoon. Ideally you'd set the Harpoons attack profile to be a "pop-up" so the missile dived down on to the less armoured deck and tried to punch through as man armoured decks as possible but even that doesn't guarantee a kill. Instead, it'd be preferable to use 2000lb LGB's on the capital ships (aimed at destroying the turrets) and use the ASM's on less armoured targets like Carriers, Destroyers, Merchant shipping etc
Ian, the block 1b harpoons didn't have the pop up ability but all others (bar block 1 that only had pop up) had a selectable terminal attack mode according to wiki. Agree that 2000lbs bombs with delayed fuses would be degustation to ships! Although I bet even 500lb ers would get the job done even on the bigger stuff (might take a few hits though). Also they would be a fair old bit cheaper than the harpoons!
Flooble said:
Indeed, but another point is that the carrier will have a decent library (and then some). If this really was travel back in the same timeline, the library would contain detailed orders of battle etc. for every single encounter. You wouldn't need to decrypt anything, you could just look it up!
That's a great point, although how long would that info stay relevant once you start altering history is something to consider.hidetheelephants said:
You'd expect it to be sucked through time with auxiliaries(and the rest of a carrier battlegroup, so an AEGIS platform or two, 2-3 ASW platforms and an SSN), the fleet train supplying lots of AVCAT along with the bombs, bullets and beans.
While that wasn't the situation as given by the OP, which was "Nimitz only", if it was the whole battle Group which went back then that would be a much more interesting proposal as a whole CVBG with all it's various Cruisers, Destroyers and SSN could make a much wider impact than just the Carrier alone could (200+ BGM-109 Tomahawks inc reloads).chuntington101 said:
That's what I was thinking! The threats to the carrier is pretty none existent!
I agree, Hawkeye's would give you an incredible amount of situational awareness to avoid all surface and air threats so the only semi-threat would have been subs and the Nimitz has enough ASW Seahawks to cope quite easily. chuntington101 said:
Although I bet even 500lb ers would get the job done even on the bigger stuff (might take a few hits though).
My thoughts were less about sinking ships and more about knocking their only offensive weaponry out. Once you destroy a turret it can't be fixed at sea, a new one will have to be built and fitted in a dock so without even without sinking you've removed it from the war effort. Regarding 500lb bombs, IJN Cruisers and above had armour designed to protect them from the plunging fire (dropping almost vertically) of USN 8in shells (335lbs) so a few 500lb LGB's might not cause enough damage to sink them and even a 2000lb one would only be the equivalent of a single 15in shell.Edited by IanH755 on Thursday 25th August 10:20
Gassing Station | Boats, Planes & Trains | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff