I'm not a horribly big paperback fan...
But not having to spend 100+dollars...
But I like hardcover more...
Joking aside, it would be nice to be able to get a rereleased copy. I'm not even really a cruiser guy myself (that's
@Aires Drake ) but still.
Heheh. Well, just note, I paid about $150 for my pristine copy of
US Cruisers in hardback, while what I've seen of the trade paperback rereleases has been going for about $40 brand new, so it's certainly a more efficient budget option. (I wasn't a big cruiser guy before I got it--I was mainly getting it because I was frustrated that US battlecruiser development wasn't covered in
US Battleships, where I figured all capital ship stuff would be. Of course,
after getting it, I started seeing the engineering challenge of designing a cruiser as more interesting...)
Fair point. The dimensions of the Mark 14 are still an issue though.
The other problem IMO with using a glide bomb kit for an unguided torpedo is that the further away you are, the lower your probability of hit, seeing as how the weapon is unguided. This isn't so much of an issue for the Mark 50 and Mark 54 which has their own seekers which work against normal human subs, but it would be an issue for any airdropped torpedo, assuming Abyssals being bullshit affects the onboard seeker of the Mark 46/50/54 or a hypothetical airdrop modified Mark 48 ADCAP. If guidance is unavailable, that means getting in close within a warship's AA envelope. Not something I'd feel comfortable doing in a P-3. >_<
Hence why my original thought was to use BUFFs and Bones to deploy large spreads of glide-ADCAPs in Bearing-Only Launch mode from outside the AA envelope--if they do manage to guide, great; if they don't, then they'll at least still function as straight-runners and I'm launching a spread from long range. (While range data on US torpedoes is classified, it's known that the ADCAP's guidance wire has a ten-mile spool in the torpedo tube, and another ten-mile spool on the torpedo itself--so unless the levelling can nerf range down to that of the Long Lance, it can do at least twenty miles after hitting the water.) Even if they end up straight-running and you have to launch from the fringes of range to avoid the AA cover, they'd still make an effective area denial weapon to "herd" the enemy into a kill zone or away from a high-value target--which is half of what torpedoes were for in any event.
Using BUFFs against ships is not entirely unprecedented, BTW; in the early 80s, Boeing modified part of the B-52G fleet to be able to launch Harpoons, and when the B-52Gs were retired, the Air Force pulled all the equipment for that off of them and installed it in the B-52H fleet, so as not to lose that capability.
For purposes of the Abyssal War, the levelling effect appears to be normalized to 1945 for shipgirls and Abyssals, and about 2015 for everything else. Sailgirls are still deeply, deeply obsolete in a naval battle.
@rm928 did point out, in his Saluda story, the one role that sailgirls would not be obsolete in. With their lack of a (running) motor, they're nearly dead silent at almost all speeds, making them both hard for submarines to detect on passive sonar, and
excellent sonar platforms in their own right. I suspect that any sailgirls who did come back would likely be outfitted with the best sonar packages we could figure out how to mate to them, then sent out with walkie-talkies to high-traffic areas to hunt subs and guide destroyers, DEs, cutters, and hovercats in onto their targets as ASW hunter-killer teams. (Akin to the SURTASS ships the US Navy operates to supplement SOSUS in tracking submarines, which are slow, quiet, essentially unarmed catamarans that trail towed arrays in areas where hostile submarines would pose a threat to the US.)
UUUUUH Thor? That was thirty years ago. And even more fictitious than this. And was Ship-to-Ship, not Ship-to-Fleet-wrecking Ocean Demons
