My point is they weren’t obsolete by WW2, they were in a bit of a weird doctrinal area by the end of the war for sure but at the start of the war they were certainly still in their prime. Remember carriers were still being figured out during the inter-war period and weren’t exactly all that great, hell the first major use of a carrier during the war was during Pearl harbor and even then that only worked so well because of how small the harbor is which restricted movements and thus the reaction (Didn’t stop the Nevada from beaching itself and becoming a point defense platform) which was frankly luck for the Japanese.
Now by the end of the war they were showing their age especially with the modernized carriers that were being pumped out nearly as fast as battleships and with the improved destroyer and escort designs that could compensate for the relative lack of defenses on carriers. Frankly speaking carriers by themselves are kinda shit, they need an escort fleet to even function lest they be even more exposed than a battleship, hell there’s a reason why everyone kept trying to make carrier battleships for awhile.
I think, especially now in the age of drones, carriers are about obsolete too, yeah. They require the massive support fleets, are a huge, slow, expensive target, and nearly their entire job can be replaced with a much smaller drone carrier. It’ll be an interesting time for naval innovation, but it’s not going to be massive ships.
My money is that shits going to evolve into something like those weird Japanese carrier destroyers or someone is going to dig up the concept for carrier submarines to adapt to drones. Pretty hard to guess since there’s always the possibility that something is found that can hard counter drones kinda like how close air support broke the artillery doctrines post WW1.
My point is they weren’t obsolete by WW2, they were in a bit of a weird doctrinal area by the end of the war for sure but at the start of the war they were certainly still in their prime. Remember carriers were still being figured out during the inter-war period and weren’t exactly all that great, hell the first major use of a carrier during the war was during Pearl harbor and even then that only worked so well because of how small the harbor is which restricted movements and thus the reaction (Didn’t stop the Nevada from beaching itself and becoming a point defense platform) which was frankly luck for the Japanese.
Now by the end of the war they were showing their age especially with the modernized carriers that were being pumped out nearly as fast as battleships and with the improved destroyer and escort designs that could compensate for the relative lack of defenses on carriers. Frankly speaking carriers by themselves are kinda shit, they need an escort fleet to even function lest they be even more exposed than a battleship, hell there’s a reason why everyone kept trying to make carrier battleships for awhile.
I think, especially now in the age of drones, carriers are about obsolete too, yeah. They require the massive support fleets, are a huge, slow, expensive target, and nearly their entire job can be replaced with a much smaller drone carrier. It’ll be an interesting time for naval innovation, but it’s not going to be massive ships.
My money is that shits going to evolve into something like those weird Japanese carrier destroyers or someone is going to dig up the concept for carrier submarines to adapt to drones. Pretty hard to guess since there’s always the possibility that something is found that can hard counter drones kinda like how close air support broke the artillery doctrines post WW1.
Edit: ignore the previous comment lemmy freaked the fuck out.