Rule The Waves 3 - A Graphical Experiment - Complete

We can continue to conduct this war if we are pressed too, but should we be pressed to? We should seek a white peace, nothing less.

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Seeking Peace
The Prime Minister approaches the German representatives, seeking peace, but the leaders of the Army convince him to scuttle the negotiations. Perhaps fortunately as two months later we are given the chance to put a new dent in the German forces. Unfortunately, defensive manoeuvres taken to protect the fleet from enemy night attacks limits the contact between the French and Germany navies and nothing comes of it. But a month after that the people demand bread and we seek peace. Italy steps up and acts as a moderator in a compromise peace.

Ships are returned from overseas internment, half the fleet is placed in reserve to manage the reduced post-war budget and the Armee is slowly but surely stood down along the front line. Aging corvettes, some of them fifty years old and used for little but minesweeping in coastal waters, are sent to the scrap yards as we have new, better, more modern ships to replace them at last. We maintain an single under-strength carrier division at full strength in order to maintain institutional knowledge, and we let a lot of other things lapse. Now is a time for new peace and new ideas.

Of course, the Autocrats in Germany and Japan cannot help but remind us that they are still allied and waiting for another chance to crush this fine Democratic Republique.

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January 1947
1947 will be a year about finishing minor construction so that we can focus on our Super Cruisers. The first quarter will see an entire squadron of medium range submarines and minesweepers arriving that were part of the war time emergency construction. The second quarter we will welcome another squadron of submarines and then the third quarter will greet our last squadron of wartime submarines (these ones long range) and another group of sub-chaser corvettes.
In February of 1947 our research teams have a remarkable breakthrough - they have discovered the principal of detecting a distant object via the principal of radio waves. This will be just the thing for detecting aircraft that are approaching a ship if we manage to develop it to the point where it might usefully be mounted aboard one. In the meantime we keep working on developing more traditional methods of protecting our ships, including from blasted mines.

We restart work on the Triomphante in May, after freeing up the needed six million francs per month by completing construction. We also scrap two of our oldest Protected Cruisers, the two surviving members of the Troude-class, the Algiers and the Friant. While they have given us thirty years of effective service, it's a decade more than their hulls and crews would prefer.

We finally replace our five year old medium bomber with a new, jet powered strike aircraft. Capable of cruising at 320 knots and with a maximum speed of 400 knots (or 200m/s) it will be slower than just one aircraft in our inventory - the small, single seat jet fighter. With a minimal load of a single 2,000lb bomb carried internally it will have a combat range of almost 3,000km, or with a maximal load of four 2,000lb bombs it will reach 1,700km. The Nieuport ND.234 will be a remarkable strike aircraft for threatening enemy warships.

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Battleship Construction
We finally restart work on the Indomptable in January of 1948, and by April of that year our budget is clear. We are not in a deficit, but are spending almost exactly our budget every month. There will be increases and decreases but over the next years we can assume that we will be fine. What, then, should be our plan in this post-war, mid-century period?
Our older super cruisers (Indomptable and Illustre-class, circa 1915) are showing their age. What should be done with them?
[ ] Refit them with new, oil firing engines and modern AA suites - they will be carrier escorts!
[ ] Refit them minimally to maintain a force at home while modern Super Cruisers go raiding.
[ ] Scrap them and be done with them, the Marine Nationale requires only the best!
[ ] Something else - write-in.
What should our focus be in the coming years?
[ ] Bolstering our air forces both at sea and on land
[ ] Bolstering our fighting forces with cruisers of all kinds
[ ] Bolstering our patrol and overseas forces with new destroyers and modern corvettes.

Our older super cruisers (Indomptable and Illustre-class, circa 1915) are showing their age. What should be done with them? Scrap them and be done with them, the Marine Nationale requires only the best!
What should our focus be in the coming years? Bolstering our patrol and overseas forces with new destroyers and modern corvettes.

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Disposing of the Old Fleet
We begin scrapping the aging cruisers that were once the pride of the Navy, beginning with the aging Attilio Regolo which was taken as a prize in the peace of 1926 against the Italians. Next to go is the Super Cruiser Terrible first laid down in 1914 but now only capable of 26 knots on old, tired engines. With seven battle stars she has more than done her duty for the Marine Nationale, and it is time for her duty to be done. Finally, the ships Illustre and Vaillant, each of which hold at least seven battle stars leave the fleet, leaving the oldest capital ship available to the Marine Nationale as the 1921-built Heroine which is, in turn, unlikely to survive much longer.

The money freed up by disposing of the wartime holdovers is used immediately to design a new class of destroyer. The Rapiere is a 2,500 ton multi-role design with a primary armament of eight dual-purpose 125mm guns in twin mounts with an AA suite that compromises two machineguns and two autocannons. It will carry eight torpedo tubes equipped for oxygen-fuelled, long range torpedoes and the equipment to reload those tubes at sea. An ahead throwing ASW mortar and depth charge launchers make it one of the best anti-submarine ships available to the Navy, while racks for twenty-five mines allows it to contribute to mining operations. Each ship will cost some eleven million francs, a tiny cost for their capabilities.

In some strange display of ostentation, the British have begun putting unusual, dish and dome structures on their ships masts. We can only presume this is to do with the newly discovered domain or radio direction finding, but whatever it is we cannot currently replicate it.

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The New Navy
We lay down three of our new destroyers in June, starting the process of refreshing our destroyer forces. With these, the new corvettes and our pair of remarkable Super Cruisers, our navy will be going into the future well equipped. However, a small speed bump has made itself known - the research teams have developed a new theory on the construction of aircraft carriers. They suggest that an angled landing deck would allow launch operations to continue across the bow even when recovering aircraft. It may be time to consider an experimental ship in the coming years.

We say goodbye to the first carrier we ever built. The Liberte was first laid down in 1899, just as the century turned, and served 17 fine years as a battleship before her conversion into an aircraft carrier. Since then she has been pressed into service several times as a combat carrier and has done twenty years work as a training ship. Now she is finally going to the yards, her aging steel is going to be cut and she will finally rest.

The thirty year old Gloire-class cruisers receive a small refit to modernise their AA suites and a new assignment - with their thirty knots of speed they will make solid, dependable escorts for carriers and with their anti-air guns they will do sterling duty at knocking down incoming aircraft. Then in April we get a delightful surprise - the invention of surface search radar of our own. While it will apparently take some time to outfit our ships with such, it's supposed to be quite the boon for our warships.

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Damn Journo's
We are interviewed for the naval chronicle and, in the process, are asked who we see our enemy of the future being. It's strange, we say, but we have begun looking beyond Europe - It is the Japanese we are truly concerned about, and given their relationship with Germany has collapsed we feel more secure than ever in demanding the return of Annam and our other South East Asian holdings. Shortly afterwards we are forced to dispatch a strong force to China in order to maintain our interests there and the Japanese present several strident protests including shadowing our carrier group with submarines. Peace is maintained, but for how long?

We do, however, face a problem. Several of our most recent aircraft acquisitions, especially those with the new, powerful jet engines, have a readiness rating far below what we have come to expect. The ND.234 jet bomber is our most capable strike aircraft yet developed, and our Loire 214 jet fighter is a remarkably agile plane, but neither of them can ever be expected to have a full squadron ready for service at any one time. Even our most modern prop fighter, the PL.205, is poorly regarded by maintenance crews.

How do we resolve this?
[ ] Redevelop these aircraft with a focus on reliability, even at the cost of capability.
[ ] Their capabilities mean even a third of a squadron active far outweighs previous planes reliability. Stay the course.
[ ] Write-in
How do we develop this angled flight deck concept?
[ ] Rebuild an older carrier into one with an angled deck
[ ] Rebuild an older carrier into an angled jet aircraft carrier.
[ ] Rebuild an modern carrier into one with an angled deck
[ ] Rebuild an modern carrier into an angled jet aircraft carrier.

How do we resolve this? Their capabilities mean even a third of a squadron active far outweighs previous planes reliability. Stay the course.
How do we develop this angled flight deck concept? Rebuild an modern carrier into an angled jet aircraft carrier.

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Experimental design
We offer up one of our most modern carriers, the Republique Francaise, for conversion. A wooden decked, straight-through carrier will - over twelve months - become the first ever angle-deck carrier in the Marine Nationale. Its aircraft capacity will drop from 82 to just 49, but in the process it will gain the capacity to operate the largest, fastest, most capable aircraft the AeroNavale can come up with. It will also gain new directors for its guns, better anti-aircraft cannons and an enhanced detection suite. It's a major project, one that involves rebalancing the entire ship, but its one we are confident in. The Republique is sent to the yards less than a year after she was first launched, and what will emerge will be something else entirely.
Triomphante and several destroyers arrive with the fleet in October of 1949. We also begin work on a new, jet capable small carrier that will be able to support our carrier divisions and replace the now tiring Agamemnon-class. At 14,300 tons displaced, the Sans Culotte-class will carry 26 aircraft into the combat zone at thirty knots, with a principal battery of auto-loaded 75mm guns for air defence. With 4.5 million francs surplus each month, we should be able to easily lay down at least two of these new ships to replace the older ones. Maybe we can even shuffle the creaking Dixmunde's off as well.

And then, of course, the Interruption. The Minister of the Navy has found a book extolling the work of the French submariners in the war before last. Never mind that we have the third largest submarine fleet in Europe, or perhaps the world. Nonetheless he wants twenty more of these little boats, and who are we to argue? We lay down eight Medium range boats of the Thon-class, six long range boats of the Esturgeon-class and six mine laying boats of the Triton-class. Somehow, we are even still in a surplus afterwards. We lay down the Sans Culotte and the Protecteur a month later.

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International Issues
We join a combined fleet in February, with an eye to thwarting Japanese expansionism in South East Asia. Surely we should all be done with war now? Have we not seen enough blood. Apparently not. While the eyes of the world are overseas, there is a political murder in the Balkans and the gaze of the Euro's is dragged back to the Autocrats we have at home. Fortunately nothing is sparked by it yet but tensions around the world are high. Perhaps we will find some time to breath now though.

Why would we ever be given that, though, when we have fools at home making our lives hard. The Minister of the Navy, fresh off the high of watching twenty new boats hit the yards, find the urge to demand twenty new destroyers as well. We frown and grumble and check the balances and reassure him that 'of course, Minister, we can manage that'.

So then we are struck with a question: How do we build twenty new destroyers, and what for:
What sort of destroyers will we build?
[ ] Diesel-driven, very long range submarine chasers
[ ] Large fleet destroyers which can act as escorts or as sub hunters themselves
[ ] Minimum-Minimum boats that wont survive a decade
[ ] Some mix of the above