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Air force or Navy
HamsterIV:
The airships of GOI from a political sense are a navy. The navy is used to impose a nation's will over trade, all the guns and torpedoes are for frightening off other nations from using their navies to impose their will over your trade. The airforce's roll is more to destroy infrastructure and prevent your enemy from doing the same back to you. You can't blockade a port, seize contraband, or impose tariffs with an air force. You can however do that with an airship fleet.
It would be extreamly difficult for an airship to be used in an infrastructure destroying capacity if that infrastructure was defended by the same weapons available in the game world. The airships can't fly high enough to be unhitable from the air based weapons in the game much less any beefier ground based variants that don't have to worry about weight. That plus bunkers would have better armor than an airship due to the complete lack of weight restrictions. So using an airship to fight through a fortified position would be next to impossible. If normal airplanes still exist (which the orriginal GOI and adventure mode seem to indicate), those airplanes would be much better suited for infrastructure destroying raids and therefor be the GOI equivalent to an air force.
Zenark:
I could see a massive airship with an enormous cannon (heavy howitzer, anyone?) bombarding a port from afar.
These are definitely navel vessels, and now that I think about current ships, it wouldn't be hard to imagine an Airship carrier that houses a dozen Squids as almost-airforce.
Thug Willis:
--- Quote from: Zenark on August 20, 2013, 02:12:14 pm ---I could see a massive airship with an enormous cannon (heavy howitzer, anyone?) bombarding a port from afar.
These are definitely navel vessels, and now that I think about current ships, it wouldn't be hard to imagine an Airship carrier that houses a dozen Squids as almost-airforce.
--- End quote ---
There wouldn't be a point in that, that's like a carrier launching out speedboats. It would have to launch out something similar to airplanes, traveling at speeds MUCH faster than the carrier/normal ships. Other wise why not just have this giant ship blow the crap out whatever, or just carry around normal ships with more fire power to survivability to cost efficiency.
--- Quote from: HamsterIV on August 20, 2013, 12:30:32 pm ---It would be extreamly difficult for an airship to be used in an infrastructure destroying capacity if that infrastructure was defended by the same weapons available in the game world. The airships can't fly high enough to be unhitable from the air based weapons in the game much less any beefier ground based variants that don't have to worry about weight. That plus bunkers would have better armor than an airship due to the complete lack of weight restrictions. So using an airship to fight through a fortified position would be next to impossible.
--- End quote ---
Amphibious invasion has been historically inefficient (reference Seal Team Eight, the book, idk proper notation), which is why you don't do it except as a last resort, or when you're 100% sure you can sustain the heavy loss to take the position. As seen with D-Day, WW2. Navies dry out countries, they don't invade (except with Marines and the proper invasion point. You were saying it, but you don't explain it very well. Also, they wouldn't go high they would go far with long range weapons. Hitting a stationary target from multiple moving positions will be easier than hitting multiple moving targets from a stationary position imo.
I agree with most of what you said though.
Balisarda:
I like Zenark's idea. The whole airship carrier full of airships is rather amusing, but that type of thing has been done before. I don't think smaller airships would be carried, but given that there are monoplanes existing in the Guns of Icarus world, I could see something like the USS Akron (a rigid airship that carried Sparrowhawk pursuit biplanes) or heck, Don Karnage's Iron Vulture from TaleSpin (am I dating myself here?). That would be rather neat to see monoplanes being launched from underneath a behemoth airship.
And putting a heavy gun in an airborne craft is nothing new. Aircraft that I can think of are the British Mosquito Mk.18, the Ju-88P, and the B-25G Mitchell. All with super-heavies (for aircraft). I think something like 75mm or so.
But that brings to point what HamsterIV was talking about. The airspeed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow. No, not really, but it is a matter of weight ratio. Airships, steampunk or otherwise, will always be carrying the lighter-weight weapons. They need to. Whereas ground installations can have as heavy and as powerful as they possibly can field; weapons that can not only out-distance the effective range of an airborne arsenal, but out explodey it too. Hitting a stationary target is fine, it sucks when that stationary target can also bring to bear more firepower and withstand more beating than you for a longer period of time.
The hitting of moving targets isn't much an issue, because all you need to do is hit the section of the airspace that they're in. One thing my great-uncle, who was a waist gunner for a B-24 during the Second World War, always mentioned, was how terrifying the flak fields were. Because it was so thick, so precise, so impersonal, and so invisible. All you saw was the puff of black smoke, not the fragments of shrapnel nor the rounds ascending. And there were tens of thousands of rounds all trying to occupy the same airspace that you were in.
Also, in the concept that you can just bombard a defense into submission and it'll work, well, I have an island to sell you on that idea. It's called Iwo Jima, and the American brass thought that after a three days of bombardment (some of which was 14-inch munitions) that the Japanese would be so shell-shocked that the American forces could just relatively waltz in. Instead, the Japanese kept their heads down, dusted themselves off, and some 36 days later, after 26,000 American casualties and almost 22,000 Japanese dead, Americans had secured the island.
Defense and offense are always vying against each other, and ground to air defense is always a better bet than air to ground assault (given relatively equal technology advances).
GeoRmr:
The use of the word 'beam' in the signal commands: "Enemy sighted on port beam!'
Contextualises the airships as naval vessles.
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