I see Utah as a momboat. Granted, that may just be me. Mostly because of her being the oldest BB still around (albeit barely) and a training ship.
There is the other side of this.
A self fulfilling prophecy.
Utah screaming at her Captain & Admiral, they 'ignore' her and when Attacked and Sunk, she goes Abyssal.
Enterprise is supposed to have a personality shift after Pearl Harbor, right?
Hmm.
But yes, big personality shift from Little E to Big E. Granted I'm not going to touch a
whole lot on Big E, since that would be spoiling a rather big thing in my Quest. But...yeah.
Very nice. I like how you're characterizing Yorktown, although I think her reaction to hearing about her own and her sisters' fates was really glossed over. Even a little bit can go a long way, in that regard--it doesn't have to be anything she says, either. If you want ideas for that, let me know.
And Utah...them feels, man.
One significant issue, though: Thompson should not be using the future-tense for talking about his alternate timeline's past. The way he occasionally refers to it, it sounds like a prophecy or outright certainty, which is both wrong and gives the wrong implications in-character. Additionally, it's not something you stick to consistently, so it's clearly a slip-up, rather than a deliberate choice on Thompson's part (as nonsensical as that would be). Using the past tense would be correct, though using a more hypothetical tone would work, too (like saying "would" rather than "will").
A minor thing: it's not just new fighter tactics like the Thach Weave that saw ever-greater success for the Wildcat and P-40 over the Zero; it was also using maneuvers that took advantage of their ruggedness and performance at higher speeds (among other things) that really changed things. Wildcats couldn't turn with Zeros at slower speeds, but the opposite was true at high speeds; similarly, starting air combat with a higher altitude let them take advantage of superior dive performance (which you've already shown, granted, but not in the context of dogfighting), and doing half-S-turns to keep up with a Zero in a turn while maintaining airspeed, etc. And then there was the fact that Dauntlesses could pull crushing-G-turns repeatedly, which, combined with its ruggedness, let it dogfight with Zeros despite its slow speed and relatively anemic firepower (a pair of 50-cals).
Except for that last one, it's worth noting that Thompson would probably know these things specifically--they ended up holding true for decades afterwards. It wasn't until the F-14, F-15, and F-16 that this paradigm really changed. From the Korean War to the Vietnam War, USN aircraft had superior thrust, climb/dive, and performance at high speeds than their opponents, which could turn much more tightly at lower speeds and perform better at lower altitudes. Thus, an emphasis on boom-and-zoom and more vertical maneuvers was a pretty key component of USN carrier aviation for a rather long time.
Hmm...admittedly, I was planning on showing more of Yorktown's feelings in the next chapter, when she and E meet up. Though I'm certainly not adverse to advice in writing, by any means.
As for the tense issues...had not noticed I was doing that, so yeah, slip-up. I'll keep a closer eye on that moving forward.
The tactics...all very true...
for the Wildcat. Teaching power tactics to the Dauntless boys would work, but right now, the USN is using the F2A-
2 Buffalo. This is before they weighed the thing down with the -3 model, which is the one used at Midway, which is more of a Wildcat-lite than a Zero-lite. The -2 model, by contrast, is considered a light and maneuverable- if rather slow, relatively speaking -bird. So the tactics for
it are quite different than for the Wildcat.
That said, the moment the -3 model comes out (it saw limited use on Lex and Sara) leave alone the Wildcat...power tactics become a lot more relevant.
More like Pearl Harbor was just the start. I imagine it'd make her feel like just being alive was surreal, but after seeing her home port be reduced to smoking ruins and the entirety of Battleship Row turned into a smoldering oil-slick graveyard, that'd be especially haunting.
Then she saw her sisters die one-by-one in every battle, with the battles she wasn't there for featuring the loss of yet another one of her fellow carriers. Hell, after barely surviving "Bloody Santa Cruz", she was hurriedly patched up just enough to let her carry and launch planes into battle--her forward flight deck was still inoperable, so she couldn't land any planes--to get back into the fight and let her air group operate from Henderson Field. Just lost her two remaining sisters in horrible fashion? Horribly damaged and nearly died herself? She can barely stand? Doesn't matter; she's getting back into the fight, even if she has to fight alone, because there are no other carriers left.
How's that for a personality shift?
I shudder to imagine what Enterprise must have been like in CD's original timeline, if she wasn't summoned after her sisters were.
Ayup. Big E did
not have a fun time in the war, to say the least. This will be touched on when Thompson actually meets her.
USS Vestal was the repair ship that was working on little E for Santa Cruz.
E went in to the fight with a large chunk of vestal's men repairing her through the fight.
Huh.
Very nice!
Yorktown seems like a fun girl and her reactions to being effectively curbstomped were pretty amusing. I'm glad to see she's willing to set that aside given the purpose of the curbstomp though. She's not happy, but she has her eyes on the prize.
I'm really curious about Little E now. I've only ever heard of Big E, so there's likely something very different here.
And Utah... I want her to have all the hugs possible. Just dogpiled by all the other BB's giving her hugs and affection.
This... worries me. And is likely nothing more than the effects of being an old ship, but this still worries me.
Most certainly.
Little E is nothing like
Big E, personality wise.
Utah...the poor girl is not aging well, to say the least. Y'know, she's
not that old.
USS Utah: Laid down, March 9th, 1909. Commissioned, August 31, 1911.
USS Wyoming, her immediate successor in both when she was built and as a training ship: Laid down, February 9th, 1910. Commissioned, Sep. 25, 1912.
Ari: L.D., March, '14. Commissioned, October, '16.
Note something? Utah is only
five years older than Ari. It's worse for the New York and Nevada sisters. And Wyoming? She lasted right up till '47 in her training role, despite being only a year younger than Utah. Her sister Arkansas lasted as an
active duty battleship until she was sunk at Crossroads. Wyoming was in such good shape even as a training ship, that there were rumblings of refitting her for active surface at points.
Utah? She's in such
bad shape, that she feels far older than she really is, not that she's particularly
young, mind you. She's a ship that is used as a target, and is maintained as such. She doesn't get a proper refit until she's converted to a more proper training ship, in May of '41. Her maintenance is rather low-priority, as a demilitarized target boat. Why should limited funds be used on her, instead of refitting the active battleline, after all?
It gets worse, when you think of what happens after she was sunk. This was a girl who was almost raised, the same way they raised Oklahoma. But it didn't quite work, leaving her laying on her side in the harbor. Did the navy try again? Nope, Utah had no military value and had cleared her berth, so they left her as is. Not even the dignity of scrapping, nor the sense of 'this girl is a monument' like Ari. She's pretty well forgotten, and took a decade after Ari to even get her small little memorial.
This is the tragedy of Utah. A girl who aged badly, and didn't even have the dignity of a proper recovery effort. Nor is she remembered, in the same way that Ari or Oklahoma are.
Now, excuse me while I get whatever this is out of my eye...
Something happening more often, as
Didn't occur to me that the losing side of that training battle would be a bit sore afterwards.
Well, Yorktown was basically double-teamed and curbstomped, so she has a bit of a good reason to be sore about it.
I'm just waiting for Thompson to realize or at least internalize the fact that he's teaching his girls to kill their allies the Japanese ship girls. How is he going to feel about having his girls fighting the first group of ships to come back to protect humanity.
He's already contemplated that in the prologue:
Yup. He's trying
very hard not to think about what he's being forced to do. The moment an actual battle happens? Hoo boy...he's not going to be in a good place.
Main trouble is to get a valid excuse to put these tactics to test. There are no reports of the current japanese planes capabilities yet, therefore american planes are preparing based on the little they know about European fighter tactics which were based on the nimble and powerful Splitfire, which meant that if he just pushes for power dives tactics most of his veteran aircrew will complain for the (to their PoV) pointless shift. He needs a report of the planes from the chinese or a naval attache or something before he can start training the crews to counter the light Zero plane.
^This, in addition to what I put above, is the reason for the tactics he's teaching. It was noted in Thach's segment, but right now what
very little they know of Japan's fighters are based on the A5M, the 'stubby little bird with fixed gear'. The Zero? Only entered service in July '40, so there is no real information about it at all. Trying to emphasize fighting Zero-style enemies is...difficult, when there is no indication of a
need for that.
I can't imagine she was/will be very upset, especially after she learns about Nanking and Bataan.
Suffice to say, I've got a very specific characterization of Big E (and yes, I'm going to continue to differentiate there. Pre-War is Little E, post-war is Big E).
Not that we'll see much of it in
here, but in AriQuest? Yup, that's going to be...interesting.
FEAHC!Enterprise: "Goddamnit, York."
FEAHC!Yorktown: "Daww, who's the Little E? You are! Teehehe..."
Chennault sent several dispatches back to Army Intelligence on the capabilities of the Japanese fighter planes encountered in China. The Army's universal response: "Bullshit." The US simply refused to believe that such planes could exist, because such a combination of speed and maneuverability
couldn't exist without a completely different design paradigm that stripped out armor and other things that made a plane heavy.
Army Intelligence then went on to say that even if such a plane
did exist, there was no way it was made by the
Japanese; the Germans had to have done it and were flying under a Japanese flag. So there's that.
And then there's the, mentioned above, fact that Zero's aren't really a thing yet either.
I foresee that Thompson might try to either negotiate with his Japanese counterpoint at the start of each battle to try and limit casualties, or that he will try to capture some Japanese ships so that he can communicate with the IJN shipgirls
The former would...not go well. The latter, is possible but it's kind of a thing that you scuttle your ships before you let them be captured sooo...
(That was a long reply)
EDIT:
Utah probably would be shifted to Europe for shore bombardment duty, had she not been sunk. Not much else the old girls can do.
Can't even do that, without a
MAJOR refit. She doesn't have anything beyond some 5in guns for training, when she's sunk. Getting new 12inchers into her turrets would be a lot of work, leave alone fixing up her engines and armor to make her more than a sitting duck.
