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Now that we have Rising Sun running on XP and Windows7, we can concentrate on the next phase of Rising Sun. It starts with Scarsdale Jack Newkirk at Chiang Mai, Guadalcanal and the Solomons, New Guinea and ends back in Burma shooting up shipping on the Irrawaddy River. Some pics during testing: P-40E on parafrag attack. P-38L pit (separate versions for the F/G, J and L) and 8 has all the controls moving. Our best model to date... Sister ships. Not just two paint jobs. Hinch insisted on a separate Lexington and Saratoga. We went back and put the stripes and some grunge on the Lex. Oops. Wrong sister. CV-3 Saratoga in pre-camo paint.
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What bugged me about the Lexington and Saratoga...........having to remove those nice cruiser guns.
Not good for the flight deck though, when turned to port. Blast is not your friend.
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Well, they are beautiful ships and beautiful work, Hinch. I thought you'd like seeing them together. I doubt they ever were...at least in these paint jobs. Here is the above scene in the real (not test) mission. May switch to a "solid" chute instead of our TGA version. That's gotta hurt.
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Mike Junior Member
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Phase 3 looks promising. Love the low level attacks and straffing.
Win7-64bit, Alienware X51, Graphics card NVDIA GeForce GTX 555 In Mauritius, we are once again taught how to live life: to take one's time, to socialize and mix up with different people, to taste unknown flavours, to admire nature and to appreciate the first light of dawn...
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AWESOME!!! AWESOME!!! AWESOME!!! Can't wait till the release! Keep up the great work!
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What bugged me about the Lexington and Saratoga...........having to remove those nice cruiser guns.
Not good for the flight deck though, when turned to port. Blast is not your friend. Yeah, it would have been a desperate measure if you had to use those guns in a real fight. It made sense to get rid of them. But they were pretty. Those two ships were probably the best pre-war carriers made. Fast, big, and compared to the Kagi and Akagi took much less energy to convert and update. I would love to have seen how the Akagi and Kaga would have fared against the Lex and Saratoaga in a 1920's configuration fight.
The artist formerly known as SimHq Tom Cofield
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Yeah, it would have been a desperate measure if you had to use those guns in a real fight. It made sense to get rid of them. But they were pretty.
Agreed. Given the known effects of blast, I'm not quite sure what the designers were thinking. Hard to imagine Lexington/Saratoga operating alone, taking on destroyer/cruiser opponents.
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In 1940 you are right but remember that these ships were redesigned and built in the mid 20's and there were no other US ships available that could protect them from larger surface combatants, at least any that could keep up with her. The US Navy was not cruiser strong in the 1920s.
In the 1920's the most modern cruiser in the US fleet were the Omaha class CLs; which was really just an enlarged and mildly upgunned destroyer leader. The older armored cruisers were too slow to sail with the Lexington or Saratoga and most of them were being scrapped anyways. Their usefulness would have been questionable in the first place. The Salt Lake City and Pensacola weren't commissioned until two years after the Lex and Sara. The BBs were, as you know, part of a design that emphasized protection and endurance over speed so they wouldn't be able to help the carriers either.
It made sense, in 1927, to put those cruiser guns on her because the Japanese had several heavy cruisers available in 1927 (Furitaka, Aoba classes) that would be as fast as the Lex and Sara and armed with 8 inch guns. In the event of a running gun fight there would be no choice but to use those guns. By 1935 it was a moot point, the Pensacola and Northampton classes made the cruiser guns on the carriers redundant but there was a legitimate use for them when the ships first set sail.
The artist formerly known as SimHq Tom Cofield
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All good points.
But still, they operated as aircraft carriers from the word go. I would assume that accurate gunnery was not the highest priority...........(see air operations/blast/flightdeck/etc.) Surely, the ships would never have been in a suitable situation to take on designed cruisers, regardless of US cruiser/battleship capabilities.
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Hard to say. I am sure the USN never thought the Battle of Suriago Strait would happen either. The US Navy was vulnerable to intermediate size ship attacks in the 1920s, like most major navies. The Sara and Lex would have had to rely on a bunch of 4 stack destroyers to protect her from a much improved Japanese destroyer force in the 20s and into the early 30s. As I said, the Omaha class cruisers were ok but were designed to scout for the BBs, not the carriers.
In addition, the capabilities of carrier aircraft were much less than they were by the late 30s and early 40s. It is pretty easy to rip on the capabilities of the TBD but compared to the biplane aircraft used in the 20s and 30s it was substantially better. The old SBUs and XBGs used on these ships were limited in their range and capabilities and the Navy feared that a determined enemy in force wouldn't be deterred by these aircraft. Plus there was a fear that the carriers, if trying to transit the route to the Phillipines, could be caught in a pincer from the south and north.
And you are right, they wouldn't be the equal of full blown cruisers, although they still had the speed and armor (for the most part) of a battlecruiser. The issue would have been gunnery ability, something I am sure wasn't practiced to the precision of the all gun cruiser teams. They would have been ad a disadvantage for sure.
The artist formerly known as SimHq Tom Cofield
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