|
Just a few things I want to point out:
Daigo: You mentioned that an OKW has a giant space heatsink. This is incorrect. While Space is a vacuum and may be absolute zero, because it is a vacuum you are unable to vent off that excess heat, because there is no medium to transfer the heat from your OKW into space. Don't believe me? Use a thermos. The reason the thermos works to seal in hot liquids is because of the vacuum inside that prevents the liquids discharging their heat.
As for antiship missiles aimed at carriers, you're thinking of the French Exocet. Part of the reason Exocet got its rep in the Falklands, however, is due to the fact that the Royal Navy were not adequately geared for countermissile warfare - they were a primarily an ASW-focused navy. There's also the trick put into practice by the Royal Navy, which did work (and caused a few hair raising near misses) of mounting missile decoys to helicopters, in which case your chopper flies up and decoys the antiship missile to it. You also seem to have forgotten about countermissile systems like ECM, chaff, and point defense installations.
Also, despite it being the age of missiles, nobody in any military today is saying that fighters can be replaced by missiles.
Submersible carriers existed in SDF:M; I'm very amused everyone seems to have forgetten that Daedalus was a submbersible Destroid carrier. The way I see it, it appears to have been primarily intended as a landing ship. IMO submersible carriers would probably be like Daedalus and Tuatha de Danaan from Full Metal Panic: Amphibious Assault Ships, designed to deploy and support a landing force, with a small number of organic air assets: in Tuatha de Danaan's case, enough heavy lift choppers to deploy its mecha complement, around 4-6 RAH-66 Comanches for CAS, and another 6 upgraded supersonic Uber Harrier II Pluses (all with optical camo, but then FMP is a universe of its own...) Actually when one looks at the makeup of TDD-1's air wing it's very heavily modeled off the USMC's Marine Expeditionary Unit.
Now, a submersible carrier wouldn't be very good for force projections; I was talking with a friend of mine, a retired RN officer, and he said that part of the reason a carrier has force projection is that it's there and it's visible, and within a 1000 square mile area of itself, it controls the sea and anything in it. Submarines are stealthy and are more for sneak attacks and surprise nuke launches. The most likely users of a submersible carrier I can see, in this our universe, would be the Marines: if in the future amphibious operations are going to be too dangerous for an ESG to loiter, then a Amphibious Assault Submarine will be one option to consider.
But aircraft carriers being obselete? Not very likely. You'll still need pilots flying top cover to protect the ground pounders, especially in the Marine Corps, which jealously guards its air wings from misappropriation by everyone else. In the words of a Marine 2-star at a NATO conference: "We regard our airplanes as goddamned rifles with wings."
|