How would you build a Steampunk aerial warship?

[Simon_Jester]

I would suspect that aerial warships would have smaller guns but their targets would not be as heavy as navy ships. Would the turrets require the same mobility as aa guns? Smaller warships mount fixed guns like a tank destroyer and pray speed is armor? Is there any chance an aerial torpedo gives a small airship the punch of a heavy ship or is the only way to defeat a heavy with another heavy?

Aerial battleships would never be armored on the same scale as naval ones. A wet-navy battleship's heavy armor covers only a small fraction of the hull: the superstructure has little or no armor, and the parts of the hull well below the waterline don't either, nor do the bow and stern get much protection. The really strong armor is concentrated in a "belt" along the waterline and extending up to the main deck, to stop shells coming in horizontally from penetrating to the engines and magazine. This belt usually won't reach the whole length of the ship. Further strong armor covers the gun turrets, and on more modern battleships there was considerable armor on the deck to provide some cover against shells coming in on arching paths, at high angles from long range. But the bottom of the hull is unarmored (though it may have anti-torpedo "crumple zones," and the top is only lightly protected.

In the air this would be suicide. Relatively small caliber guns (3" to 5" or so) could easily be elevated to riddle your ship's hull from below, and plunging close range fire from above would be a serious threat- especially since shells fired from high above could actually gain quite a bit of speed by the time they hit your deck.

Assuming that you can't build your battleship arbitrarily heavy, i.e. it can't actually be much heavier than a wet-navy ship of the same volume, you can't armor the entire hull to that level... which means that you have to spread the armor thinner and wider to cover everything from every angle. Ammunition storage has to be heavily protected from below, as do engines of whatever kind you're using. You'll also need things like rangefinders that can see below the ship, looking down at an angle to spot enemy targets at low altitude or on the ground, which takes extra weight and adds dangly bits to the ship.

The net result is that "aerial battleships" would always be more vulnerable to medium-caliber gunfire than real ones; I doubt there would ever be much need to mount anything heavier than 8" guns on the ships at all. On the other hand, accuracy using WWI-level fire control would be very poor, so you need high volume of fire- massed 6" and 8" guns are more likely than traditional "big guns" of 12" to 16" caliber.

[spaceviking]

Except that would probably require something the approximate size of a CVN if not a freaking Star Destroyer, and far as I know the 'late 19th century technology' bit hasn't been chucked yet so no carrier airships.

Well they could employ some sort of catapult, and I don't know much about flying but if the planes were launched from high enough would they need much of a runway? Maybe taking off would be more pulling up out of a dive.

[Darkevilme]

Well they could employ some sort of catapult, and I don't know much about flying but if the planes were launched from high enough would they need much of a runway? Maybe taking off would be more pulling up out of a dive.

I'm pretty sure you need a runway to do that little manouver where you transition from above your stall speed to zero in a controlled manner. I think it's called landing by those piloty folks. And the trouble with doing it with say, a giant hook the pilot flies into is that wooden aircraft and human pilots have questionable reactions to sudden and violent deceleration. In the case of the aircraft I doubt suddenly having the entire force of their forward motion applying strain to the one point where the hook is would do anything terribly good to a wooden framed aircraft. So either way you need enough of a length of space to land these aircraft without damaging them or the pilots, and an actual runway is probably your best bet.

You could have the hook mounted on rails i suppose, so it wooshes along the length of the zeppelin to bleed off acceleration. Somehow though i dont think pilots will thank you for telling them to fly their wooden airplanes at large metal hooks.

[Sea Skimmer]

Well they could employ some sort of catapult, and I don't know much about flying but if the planes were launched from high enough would they need much of a runway? Maybe taking off would be more pulling up out of a dive.

It'd be like trying to pull out of a stall, and since planes in a stall don't necessarily fall nose down this would be suicidally dangerous as a normal method of operation. The USN operated aerial aircraft carriers using biplanes launched from dirigibles but it was an incredibly limited concept. The planes had to be tiny and the airships could carry very little in the way of fuel for them. Launch and recovery was very difficult.

[jollyreaper]

coming in horizontally from penetrating to the engines and magazine. This belt usually won't reach the whole length of the ship. Further strong armor covers the gun turrets, and on more modern battleships there was considerable armor on the deck to provide some cover against shells coming in on arching paths, at high angles from long range. But the bottom of the hull is unarmored (though it may have anti-torpedo "crumple zones," and the top is only lightly protected.

Yeah. I'm thinking a flying battleship couldn't get away with being a steel brick. I was playing around with the concept for the Into the Void setting I'd mentioned in another thread. Battleships need the long hull for hydrodynamics and the wide beam for stability. Those are serious, nonnegotiable design constraints.

I'm thinking battleships would have main guns that would seem a bit underpowered compared to surface combatants but adequate for the air. AA-style mounts with the ability to direct-fire or lob shells depending on the target. Computerized fire-control and all that. I'm not sure how much difficulty they'd have giving a gun that large the range of motion required while still keeping all the inner workings protected by an armored box. Given aerodynamic constraint, the ships may well be blunt like a bullet. If there's a need to stretch the hull for any reason, armor would be concentrated on the mission-critical bits. WWII aircraft were armored in a similar fashion; look at the shot-up planes that returned, don't armor the places that do have holes, armor the places that don't because planes hit there were likely the ones that didn't make it back. I'd tend to think most places in a ship are mission-critical but we have stories of American destroyers facing down Japanese cruisers and surviving direct hits because the shells were able to pass through and explode on the other side. This was during the defense of Taffy-3. Some destroyers pressed their attacks so close the Japanese couldn't depress their guns low enough to engage.

One other thought is that even if a ship can be hard to knock out of the air with powerplants and antigrav doohickeys deep inside the hull, a mission-kill might be easier with lighter weapons. Knock out the engines and guns, it's not doing anything useful even if it didn't explode.

In the air this would be suicide. Relatively small caliber guns (3" to 5" or so) could easily be elevated to riddle your ship's hull from below, and plunging close range fire from above would be a serious threat- especially since shells fired from high above could actually gain quite a bit of speed by the time they hit your deck.

Altitude confers an advantage but also makes you more visible. So it's a gamble... good for drama. A dominant force defending an area would have radars lit, especially from fixed positions because the enemy of course knows they're there. Perhaps some of the patrolling units would keep their emitters off until vectored in for an attack. Attackers, meanwhile, would keep their emitters off since they know where the defenders should be from previous recon, know where they are by what they're emitting and want to preserve the surprise of their presence as long as possible. An attacker trying to sneak in amongst the ground clutter would thus be vulnerable to plunging fire from above while also knowing return fire will be fighting gravity to score hits. But coming in at altitude might even the gunnery equation but give up surprise. This is the stuff of good drama.

Assuming that you can't build your battleship arbitrarily heavy, i.e. it can't actually be much heavier than a wet-navy ship of the same volume, you can't armor the entire hull to that level... which means that you have to spread the armor thinner and wider to cover everything from

Well, a ship's limitation is being able to float at a given displacement. Even if a flying warship can run heavier with similar dimensions, there's still going to be trade-offs. How much power does it require, how fast can it move, how expensive is it to operate, etc.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... SciFiFleet

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... iveBalance

every angle. Ammunition storage has to be heavily protected from below, as do engines of whatever kind you're using. You'll also need things like rangefinders that can see below the ship, looking down at an angle to spot enemy targets at low altitude or on the ground, which takes extra weight and adds dangly bits to the ship.

That would get really funky with otherwise-WWI tech on flying battleships. They'd feel like gondolas hanging beneath the hull.

The net result is that "aerial battleships" would always be more vulnerable to medium-caliber gunfire than real ones; I doubt there would ever be much need to mount anything heavier than 8" guns on the ships at all. On the other hand, accuracy using WWI-level fire control would be very poor, so you need high volume of fire- massed 6" and 8" guns are more likely than traditional "big guns" of 12" to 16" caliber.

If aerial battleships can't mount the same kind of armor as wet battleships, then perhaps they would use lower-caliber guns firing in heavy volleys that could be steared by sight with tracers. Traditional rangefinding depended on splashes which you wouldn't have in the air. So while ships might theoretically be fighting at long ranges on the surface and could possibly have long effective ranges in the air, perhaps practical fights would be at spitting distance because of the difficulty in accurately aiming fire. Not an issue with radar-directed fire-control but it would have to factor in with manually-aimed weapons.

[Sea Skimmer]

I'd tend to think most places in a ship are mission-critical but we have stories of American destroyers facing down Japanese cruisers and surviving direct hits because the shells were able to pass through and explode on the other side. This was during the defense of Taffy-3. Some destroyers pressed their attacks so close the Japanese couldn't depress their guns low enough to engage.

Lack of depression is mythical, the ranges at which it would become relevant are silly short and you could always have fired on the roll. The US destroyers survived so long in large part because the Japanese had very tight salvo dispersion, and they had very long shell delays on ammunition which indeed let some shells pass through without exploding. Both intended to make those silly underwater diving shells effective; they also had little but APC ammo so no HE to shoot. Didn't help that the ships crews were tired, American use of smoke was masterful and the Japanese were constantly shifting course in disorder to evade air attacks. Japanese long range gunnery seems to have largely sucked throughout the war; likely because of the salvo dispersion issue. In early 1942 two Japanese battleships and two heavy cruisers fired a well over a thousand shells at a single US destroyer without being able to stop it; a squadron of carrier launched dive bombers had to be summed to bring USS Edsall to a halt so the surface force could finish her off.

One other thought is that even if a ship can be hard to knock out of the air with powerplants and antigrav doohickeys deep inside the hull, a mission-kill might be easier with lighter weapons. Knock out the engines and guns, it's not doing anything useful even if it didn't explode.

Guns are no more exposed then on a normal battleship; actually less so given that your harder to hit on average. Engines can be protected, internal fans protected by curved ducts and armored grates are very plausible for providing thrust depending on just how much speed is desired. A steering system may be harder to protect. Also late 19th century means most shells are likely not filled with high explosives yet; depending on just what this means of course. If we mean 1880 then we don't even have smokeless powder guns, wooden hulls are still sort of credible and battle will take place at a thousand yards (prepare for boarding!)

Questions also exist on how you change altitude and if some kind of horizontal flight control surfaces are needed, or one does it by directly adjusting the anti gravity system. Can we bank as we fly level to increase elevation or depression, should the ship be engineered to fight orbiting a target like an AC-47 when desired?

Lots of other problems exist too, don't have time to type them now, need sleep, but say for example normally warship engines rely on huge condensers using seawater cooling. Without this advantage you either need some big air exposed condensers, or just blow steam overboard. Its not as bad as with turbines though, so use of late 19th century machinery makes this less troublesome then it would be by WW1. People seem to be jumping around some with technology though. For example late 19th century nobody really had AP shells that worked; so protection requirements are somewhat different then they might be in WW1. Also we can't sink, and we don't crash from too much drag like an aircraft, so its no longer critical to protect a waterline from any hole what so ever and having the skin falling apart only matters for structural reasons; so this means layered protection is plausible. Armor may not all be in one belt. Might be in two belts with a coal bunker in between.

That would get really funky with otherwise-WWI tech on flying battleships. They'd feel like gondolas hanging beneath the hull.

It's really not that hard to devise a mechanical/optical periscope system to let someone sitting normally look around under the ship 360 degrees and with a full range of elevation. Some bombers had turrets controlled this way, the fire control system for the AH-56 also worked like this, though with much added complexity. How important bottom fire is depends on our ceiling limit.

If aerial battleships can't mount the same kind of armor as wet battleships, then perhaps they would use lower-caliber guns firing in heavy volleys that could be steared by sight with tracers. Traditional rangefinding depended on splashes which you wouldn't have in the air.

Spot with time fused ammunition which has some inaccuracy, about 2% of the range for powder train fuses, but it would work. Mechanical fuses could do about .5% of the range in WW2, but might not work at all in the late 19th century. At least not at a sane cost. Tracers aren't likely to work at more then a few thousand yards and they get confusing quickly if both sides fire them. Engagement ranges are bound to be much lower indeed, because the ranges will close so rapidly and the target can move in 3D if nothing else. Radar doesn't solve everything until well, maybe by the 1960s it would because it can track the actual shells with reliability in mid flight (this can sort of be done in WW2, but not enough to count on) and you had electronic computers for weather, but blind radar fire control in WW2 worked by spotting the shell splashes. Just predicting target range/course/speed wasn't good enough.

[Simon_Jester]

Skimmer, remember that these battleships are big damn radar targets; if you can build AA guns to get reliable hits with proximity fuzed AA shells on a buzz bomb, you should be able to get reliable direct hits with AP rounds on a flying battleship-sized target, I'd think.

But you're right, there are at least three or four different possible iterations of this ship design. 1880 or earlier gives you something that looks very much like a flying sailing ship, only with a big aerial propellor spinning in back. 1900 is different, 1910-1920 different still, and by 1940 things look complicated, ugly and dangerous if you want these things to fight effectively.

Altitude confers an advantage but also makes you more visible. So it's a gamble... good for drama. A dominant force defending an area would have radars lit, especially from fixed positions because the enemy of course knows they're there.

Literal radar makes flying battleships suicide. The enemy can haul in massed barrages of AA gunfire that is practically guaranteed to hit the hull every damn time, and unless the ship's armor makes it immune it's in trouble. Also, historically, radar-guided guns come shortly before air to air missiles (SAMs with HEAT warheads would be a nightmare for a flying battleship) and, potentially, nuclear bombs (which make the whole idea of aerial battleships totally unsurvivable no matter how well you armor them).

Radar-controlled gunnery would also favor large-caliber guns over small ones for taking down aerial battleships, because you have a much better chance of hitting a slow-moving target with a few slower-firing guns if you have radar for fire control.

That places you very firmly in the WWII era, when battleships were becoming obsolete on the sea too.

Whatever technology lets you build viable flying battleships actually might be well-used to build flying aircraft carriers, come to think of it. It wouldn't be that hard to build the things big and nuclear-powered, which means they never really have to land and can use nuclear power to run their own engines. You'd have something considerably more mobile than a real aircraft carrier, possibly- although it would also be easier to see and target with long range missiles.

[Stormin]

How about rather than armoring up an airship, relying on small interceptors for protection? The airship itself avoids anti aircraft guns at all cost, and serves as a long range platform for fighters and bombers

Wouldn't the "Fighters" in this case just be smaller one-man airships? Just tow the buggers since they float on their own. Then you can have dramatic scenes of pilots crawling along ropes to their fighters during an attack in high wind.

[jollyreaper]

Concerning aaa fire, maybe that just means a flying battleship avoids coming in range. "A ships a fool who fights a fort." But this raises the question of how a flying force would attack a ground target or anything else heavily defended. If the setting has cruise missiles...

Tech moves so quickly, what we have frozen in our minds as the way things were for 20th century wars is only because of the times they were fought. Move the start forward or back and it's a different experience. If WWII started in the 30's then our most memorable fighters could still be all-metal biplanes. If WWI started in the late 19th it could have been in that brief period where armor trumped guns and ships were fitted with ramming prows. As far as I know none of the ships built to that pattern ever saw combat so the theory was never put to the test. If it did work, we'd probably insist on having our combat starships equipped the same way so we can have proper ramming and boarding actions, just like in real life.

[Sea Skimmer]

Skimmer, remember that these battleships are big damn radar targets; if you can build AA guns to get reliable hits with proximity fuzed AA shells on a buzz bomb, you should be able to get reliable direct hits with AP rounds on a flying battleship-sized target, I'd think.

Like a battleship on the surface is a small one? The size of the radar return has nothing to do with the accuracy of the return, which in turn has nothing to do with the issue in the first place with is ability to actually predict the accuracy of gunfire. SCR-584 radar could not match the range of battleship guns even under optimal circumstances, which among other things involved it sitting on level stationary ground. Buzz bombs were shot down at fairly close range while they flew straight and level almost directly at the firing batteries; the allies knew the exact sites of launch ramps remember and placed guns directly between them and the targets,

[Simon_Jester]

Buzz bombs were shot down at fairly close range while they flew straight and level almost directly at the firing batteries; the allies knew the exact sites of launch ramps remember and placed guns directly between them and the targets,

Ahhh.

I'm sorry, this part I actually did not know- that the battery placement was that careful. I'd assumed the high kill rate reflected something more like normal operating conditions for the guns, at least for straight, level-flying targets, which aerial battleships would almost have to be because there's no way they're going to be nearly as fast as fixed-wing aircraft.

Nevermind.

[Sea Skimmer]

Literal radar makes flying battleships suicide. The enemy can haul in massed barrages of AA gunfire that is practically guaranteed to hit the hull every damn time, and unless the ship's armor makes it immune it's in trouble. Also, historically, radar-guided guns come shortly before air to air missiles (SAMs with HEAT warheads would be a nightmare for a flying battleship) and, potentially, nuclear bombs (which make the whole idea of aerial battleships totally unsurvivable no matter how well you armor them).

The Bikini atoll tests actually suggest a battleship could survive to the very edge of a 20kt nuclear fireball and be mobile and repairable afterwards; though you'd never be able to decontaminate the surface unless you had special coatings. The ability of a flying battleship to stop moving, or move very slowly actually presents a tremendous problem for radar systems into the later 1980s. This is because pulse doppler radar needs the target to move to detect it, and non doppler radars suffer from massive problems with ground clutter while being much easier to jam. Hovering helicopters are actually immune to a considerable number of cold war radar systems; some of the more advanced ones could track them but only by tracking the movement of the rotor blades. If mr aerial battleship has its propulsion buried inside the hull that doesn't work. In the modern day you could detect anything using synthetic aperture array radars and lots of signal processing to simply 'see' the shape of the ship; but then we could also mount considerable anti missile defenses on said battleship and very very deadly weapons for locating and counterfire against a SAM site with active radar. Meanwhile since you can move freely when you want, your a very hard target for enemy artillery in turn.

The big problem remains enemy fighters and bombers; they can mess you up at any point. But once you had a measure of air superiority or even just air parity the flying battleship would be vastly more effective than aircraft for destroying ground targets on the battlefield. The combination of overwhelming direct fire, and the ability to evade and survive almost all counterfire in an indirect role is pretty hard to match.

Whatever technology lets you build viable flying battleships actually might be well-used to build flying aircraft carriers, come to think of it. It wouldn't be that hard to build the things big and nuclear-powered, which means they never really have to land and can use nuclear power to run their own engines. You'd have something considerably more mobile than a real aircraft carrier, possibly- although it would also be easier to see and target with long range missiles.

The other problem is actual deck operations would be very difficult and very dangerous because of the amount of turbulence that would be created. Even if the aerial aircraft carrier flew no faster then one sailed on the oceans surface, the mere fact that you are up in the air would increase the wind gusts considerably, and you'd have really funky things happening from all the jet thrust shooting out the back of the flying carrier and coming up under its belly. Much would depend on the speed of the ship, go fast enough and conventional aircraft could land like a harrier by matching speed and then suddenly cutting power to drop on deck or something, and how precisely it can control itself in mid flight. You've also got the basic issue that aircraft carriers are very high volume ships, so your ability to have armor is reduced for a given weight and cost, and since aircraft already have great mobility you have to weigh the costs of the ship against just building inflight refueling tankers.

[Purple]

As far as taking off from an airship goes could aircraft not use some sort of rocket buster to do this? I know there were experiments with this sort of stuff in the cold war. And fighters with buster rockets existed as early as WW2. And we know that they could make rockets back than. So the only question is if the airframe of the fighters of the time would hold up under the stress.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_length_launch

[Simon_Jester]

The other problem is actual deck operations would be very difficult and very dangerous because of the amount of turbulence that would be created. Even if the aerial aircraft carrier flew no faster then one sailed on the oceans surface, the mere fact that you are up in the air would increase the wind gusts considerably, and you'd have really funky things happening from all the jet thrust shooting out the back of the flying carrier and coming up under its belly. Much would depend on the speed of the ship, go fast enough and conventional aircraft could land like a harrier by matching speed and then suddenly cutting power to drop on deck or something, and how precisely it can control itself in mid flight. You've also got the basic issue that aircraft carriers are very high volume ships, so your ability to have armor is reduced for a given weight and cost, and since aircraft already have great mobility you have to weigh the costs of the ship against just building inflight refueling tankers.

The carrier could also stop moving and hover, could it not?

[Sea Skimmer]

The carrier could also stop moving and hover, could it not?

Aside from the operational risk and increased fuel consumption of doing so hundreds of times per day; the resulting higher landing speed creates its own difficulties. Actually hovering isn't likely to be that easy either for such a large vessel unless you've got thrusters pointing every which way. Maintaining forward speed is very useful for directional control. Landing is just going to be very hard unless you can go fast enough to make all landings basically VTOL because your already moving as fast as the aircraft. Even that has issues with punching through the boundary layer but it should be okay.

Though its worth thinking about, if you can fly as fast as the aircraft, then one might consider using that British Skyhook system for launch and recovery. It was intended for use with Harriers, in this case it could work with normal aircraft and you grab them out of the air and pull them on board. Complicated and never proven with anything but a stationary skyhook; but it means you could have a flying carrier that does not need a flight deck and could be much more compact.

[Sea Skimmer]

One would also want to examine what such massive flying craft could do in terms of making ground air bases and moving modular support equipment in between them. A flying transport with fuel, ammo and service facilities could be used to bring numerous prepared dispersal strips to life, or even additionally transport bulldozers and large chunks of runway matting to build new ones. ~1,500 tons of the latest composite runway matting will build a basic 6000x150ft fighter strip with parking area. Older aluminium matting from the 1950s could do it with around 3,000 tons. Even when you throw in the weight of land raping bulldozers this is nothing like the mass you'll end up with for an aircraft carrier. Installation could take under two days, plausibly less then one given enough engineers and the option of using larger runway mats that need machinery to move. One transport dancing around dropping off construction teams for air fields could accomplish a lot of work very quickly that would otherwise take ground convoys, or else some kind of helicopter or paradrop of men and equipment building a dirt strip for dozens and dozens of normal transport planes to fly in similar tonnages of construction material.

[jollyreaper]

Airships give you the potential to turn any piece of ground on the planet into a harbor. Wouldn't even have to be that flat if the ships can drop off modular cargo pods lowered from a hover. On flat areas they could simply land and drop ramps like a cargo jet.

The question about aircraft depends on how these things fly. If they're flying battleships there must be antigrav and if there's antigrav then can it be small enough for aircraft to use?

I like the idea of antigrav fighters being expensive and conventional aircraft being cheaper. Gives a mix of advantage and drawback for the forces involved.

One thought -- in the age of sail a ship couldn't take a fort but a fleet could land soldiers on the other side of the island to take the fort from behind. A fort well-defended from the air could prove more vulnerable to a ground assault. Or perhaps it could be a case justifying combined arms since we have WWI and II to prove that an enemy dug in deep enough cannot be dislodged through any weight of firepower. He has to be driven from the fortifications by infantry assault.

Of course, for a fort to be useful it has to sit directly on whatever the enemy wants to control. If not it will be bypassed like the Maginot Line or the various Japanese islands in the island-hopping campaign.