The Loose Association of Wargamers

It is much slower than a Cuckoo, two thirds the range, and a longer recovery. It would be a much riskier proposition. Fishing twenty of these out of the sea with cranes would be quite a task.

grizzlymc wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 12:15 pm It is much slower than a Cuckoo, two thirds the range, and a longer recovery. It would be a much riskier proposition. Fishing twenty of these out of the sea with cranes would be quite a task.

The Type 184 was successfully used at Jutland for recce & was recovered despite the seaplane carrier being between the converging fleets....
The pilot definitely had balls of marine quality steel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Rutland

I knew of Rutland of Jutland. Pulling one seaplane out of the sea is a 10-15 minute job. Pulling 20 out is a longer exercise. Which is one of the reasons they developed aircraft carriers.

You could do it with a fleet of seaplane carriers, but you still have a slow overweight, underpowered machine. The cuckoo is a much better proposition. Also, the seaplane carriers are slow for the retreat phase. Argus and Furious can outrun the German battle fleet.

Slugbalancer wrote: ↑Tue Jul 14, 2020 11:57 am Here's a couple of pics of Short S.184 with a torpedo.

There's still a big scorch-mark on the cliff above Fishguard ferry-port where one of those smacked into it.

Fascinating subject, btw. I'd not heard of this before.

No, me neither - well done, Grizz.

Some day, I'd love to do the air game, lino cut battleships and hordes of torpedo planes, again, hun fighters come up in dribs and drabs on cards or die rolls. The first time I heard of this I was hooked on the idea. Taranto 20 years earlier; wots not to loik?

Mind you, I'm weird like that, I have fantasised about Plan 1919. Still birth the stab in the back story by destroying German cities with tanks and artillery.

One of the interesting things about the cuckoo is how until the arrival of the Blackburn Ripon in 1934, RN torpedo bombers hardly advanced in terms of speed or load. Two generations of Blackburn replacements for the Cuckoo had modest increases in speed and squeezed a rear gunner in, but with little fundamental improvement. The swordfish, would have been a cracker of a WWI aircraft. A comment about the cuckoo says that, sans torpedo, it was fully aerobatic, so it would have been a hard target for fighters, particularly if escorted.

I knew about the Short but had never come across the Cuckoo before - interesting aircraft .

Of course if there had been an “early Taranto” Sempill would just have passed information on the results onto the Japanese and then Pearl Harbor attack might have been even more effective.

grizzlymc wrote: ↑Wed Jul 15, 2020 2:10 am Some day, I'd love to do the air game, lino cut battleships and hordes of torpedo planes, again, hun fighters come up in dribs and drabs on cards or die rolls. The first time I heard of this I was hooked on the idea. Taranto 20 years earlier; wots not to loik?

Mind you, I'm weird like that, I have fantasised about Plan 1919. Still birth the stab in the back story by destroying German cities with tanks and artillery.

We want photos! Amongst other 1919 plans was one for an amphibious landing, either from the North Sea or even within the Baltic. It included tanks - WWI "funnies" amongst them.

If they had sunk even one German battleship, the boost to inter war aviation would have been immense.