Whitecold wrote:I think the fundamental issue with flying gunships is their expected threat environment.
With the land war ended the Navy will have first priority again, since as long as Charis controls the sea, the Empire is impossible to invade. The Navy will like reconnaisance airships, and they might find a use for bombers if they actually work reliably, but a gunship is useless.
If you can shoot at them, so can they, and in a direct engagement the advantages are to the ship that has more mass, more guns, more armor, and is not filled with flammable hydrogen.
The army will think primarly of either defending against a landing army, or deploying oversea against an army. In both cases, it is assumed artillery will be present, and I am still waiting for automatic weapons to make an appearance.
With fortified and camouflaged emplacements, cannons on the ground have a significant advantage over a gun-armed airship.
The AC type aircraft were built to get more loiter time than conventional attack aircraft, at the cost of defensive capabilites, but this is acceptable, since they are designed for asymetric warfare, not to penetrate defended airspace.
As strategic bombers or reconnaisance platforms, they can stay out of harms way, but for direct ground support, they seem very vulnerable, and very expensive when all it takes is one lucky artillery shell.
one of the prime uses of gunships and similar, was the interdiction of the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Destroying enemy transport and communications is absolutely vital and you don't need battleships or "land behemoths" to do it.
Your gun-airship can intrude into enemy areas when intelligence tells you there's a suitable target and get there and back with way less risk and more speed than Special Forces (parachuting commandos in may of course, be a thing that occurs).
A dozen 40mm Bofor rounds into a transport ship's waterline will sink it.
A barrage of 40mm grenades will blow up a column of steam trucks.
Transportation systems will rarely has serious defences
And if they carry fuel or munitions...well, that'll will do some of the damage for you.
Cheap, easy, efficient damage and WAY more accurate than bombs.
Airships can carry a huge amount of ammo.
What ground battles will be like and whether gun-airships could be used as "ground support", well only RFC knows
but unless the enemy has effective AA weapons, so presumably for the first year or two, air-gunships could be decisive.
yeah I know these are novels and "heroics" are important
but, war is about
efficiency.
as I noted, you wouldn't use a gun-airship against any warship heavier than a destroyer and even then, only for
extremely good reasons
IF they have weapons that can hit you.
if they
can't hit you, you can pound them way more effectively than bombs can.
Dropping a bomb puts a severe strain on an airship as it rams upwards as it losses all that weight, it's a BAD thing, where as the slow loss of weight from guns firing is way less strain.
Will Charis' enemies have effective AA weapons, what type, what effectiveness...? we don't know.
the last book occurred over a considerable number of years so we're likely to see an arc of history and thus weapon development once more.
the Inner Circle have all human History to sift through and learn from.
having a dozen or whatever gunships as a fraction of their airship numbers is no strain and no loss and may well be exactly what they need for some missions.
airships are low vibration, pretty steady platforms, and from up there, your weapons will have one extremely commanding field of fire.
Accuracy is constantly overlooked, "firepower" means nothing if you don't hit the target.
That's where guided weapons and gunships come in and are so much better than dropping hundreds or thousands of tons of dumb bombs from way up.
In Vietnam the North Vietnamese had radar, radio, missiles and jets. Hence in today's world, yes Spectre gunships have to be careful.
Without those detection apparatus and communications, shooting down airships is going to a LOT harder except for major targets where you could afford to lavish extreme fixed defences, like batteries of rockets
ie harbours, capitol cities etc
and, one of the things oft forgotten, is that AA fire often killed and damaged almost as many folk as the enemy did because
what goes up, must come down!one of the most effective aircraft ever fielded, was the Douglas A-26A Invader.
it's not pretty. it isn't "sexy", it doesn't have movies made for it.
But it smashed the hell out of the enemy when and where it could be used well.
~
