Medieval fantasy ship carrier

[Argent Hellion]

I'm currently working on developing the navy for the most advanced faction in my fantasy world and I'm stuck with the design of the largest ship, a sort of a medieval carrier ship.

I'm talking about having a ship that would be roughly the same size and function as a modern aircraft carrier, with the main difference that it would carry smaller ships (Hunters) instead of aircraft because my fantasy world does not and will never have any sort of flying contraptions.

The problem with this idea is to find a way for the Hunters to sail out of and into the carrier while the carrier itself is on the move. The reasoning behind this is that the carrier would be carrying and managing several dozen Hunters, which would have a relatively short range of operation, so the carrier would have to keep up with them at a reasonable pace, especially when the operation demands prolonged harassment of the enemy.

As the carrier sails across the water, it creates a serious wake in its path and that very wake is my main design obstacle. Placing the hangar bay doors at the front of the carrier is obviously not an option, while placing them at the sides would force the Hunters to directly cut across the wake when coming in and going out every single time. Placing the hangar bay doors at the rear would force me to place the engines somewhere else and I honestly have no idea how the physics work when a smaller ship is tailgating an exponentially larger one.

So far the only concept that somewhat resolves the issue is to apply the idea from the Japanese I-400-class submarines that was attempted during WWII. This would mean providing the carrier with several cranes that would lift the Hunters out of the water while they maintain a parallel course to the carrier and bring them in. Carrying the Hunters in and out one by one seems significantly slower than allowing them to enter and leave the hangar bay relying on their own propulsion, but if there really is no alternative to it then I guess I will have to settle with that.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated...

 

[Chasejxyz]

IRL there are a bunch of yachts that can hold/dispatch smaller boats (check them out here). Also modern air craft carriers aren't big enough to be a full sized runway for the planes, so they use catapults to give them the speed to take off and catch cables to slow down fast enough to stop. Historically they would use grappling hook things to grab another ship so you can pull up to it and then do your pirate crimes.

So let's just combine all of those things. There's little docks/doors on the side of your Mother Ship and cables/lines can be used to draw the Baby Ships back in. Maybe there's a gun/catapult/launcher that can toss/shoot it to the ship, or maybe you can train a seagull to do it, idk what the limits of your tech are here.

 

[Mad Swede]

OK, assuming your world has the same sort of physical characteristics and laws as we have here.

The first thing you've got with your mother ship/carrier is a stability issue. You can't have a dock of any sort which allows your hunter ships to sail in and out whilst the carrier is on the move - this is why LPDs are stationary when landing craft leave or return to the ship. Having a stern dock isn't really a problem, it just means your propellor shafts are longer and the engines are further forward in the ship. If your technology level permits it you might also consider series of electric motors in pods down the side of the ship, as used on some modrn cruise ships.

The bow wake is more of an issue than you may think - the size of your carrier/mother ship means that a small craft approaching or sailing close to the carrier may get drawn into the side or bow of the carrier and sunk (do a search on HMS Curacoa for a real life example). The stern wake is less of an issue, but the carrier/mother ship will need to keep speed down to allow the hunter ships to approach.

If you want a relatively simple way of taking your hunter ships on and off the mother ship/carrier then you might consider a stern ramp of the sort trawlers use. The hunter ships could be let down in to the water from the ramp on the end of some form of cable (or cables) then let go. Getting the hunter ships back on board means have them sail up astern and then firing a pilot line over to them and using that to pull over a set of cables to allow the hunter ship to be drawn up the ramp. This sort of thing can be done whilst the carrier/mother ship is moving, but it can't be moving very fast (10-12 knots at most). The carrier/mother ship will need some way of marshalling the hunter ships on deck or in the hangar.

 

[skip.knox]

The subject line says medieval, but the body talks about propellers and engines, so I'm assuming we're not talking sails here but steam or something similar. And metal ships. Yes?

How big are these Hunters? Two-man vessels or a crew of twenty? Which gets us to how many Hunters are you expecting to carry with this big ship.

The first thing that occurs to me is storms. Any body of water big enough to wage war with huge ships is going to be oceanic in scale, which means gales and hurricanes. That's going to be a real problem for stability. And those Hunters won't be able to operate in heavy seas.

The second issue is vulnerability. The carrier is going to need a screen of destroyers and carriers because it will be a gigantic target for long-range guns.

Have you got solutions for those? Magic can fix much, of course.

Oh, and finally, what does a Hunter do? Is it a destroyer (ship-killer)? What counter-measures does the enemy have?

 

[Saigonnus]

Extra-Dimensional Spaces to house the hunters... and a portal from the interior leading directly to the waters outside the hull. That of course assuming magic is a thing. The only downside I can imagine is if one of these massive ships is destroyed, breaching those extradimensional spaces, then it would probably destroy EVERYTHING in the area, ally or enemy.

 

[Prince of Spires]

I think we need a bit more information about the technology level / magic level (if any) of these ships and society, as well as some details about the ships and their roles. For instance, you mention there will never be any flying machines. Is that because of some reason of fysics or you will simply never advance your timeline enough to get there and you won't write them?

When you say medieval, my mind first of all turns to Warhammer, where the Dark Elf race had huge ships which were basically floating islands. They worked (as many things in the Warhammer universe) because Magic and the rule of cool.

Lowering over the side sounds fairly plausible, and it should work if you're careful and don't go too fast I'd think. If they're small ships then you could also simply launch them into the water. I think the lifeguard brigade in the Netherlands does something like this, as well as larger ships with their life rafts. They simple drop them head first from a height into the water and off they go. Probably only works with small, sturdy ships which are completely enclosed so they'll float back to the surface

 

[The Dark One]

Why not just have a fleet - like they tended to have in medieval times? And even the biggest medieval ships were pretty small by modern standards. Columbus's ships were built at the very end of the medieval period/beginning of the early modern and they were teensy.

It depends on how wedded you are to the medieval flavour, but I'd look at a fleet. It may be prosaic but you won't have readers raising an eyebrow at your world-building.

Unless of course you have a convincing magical solution.

 

[CupofJoe]

The Chinese are reputed to have had some very large ships in the 15C. It might be worth looking into Chinese Treasure Ships or ideas.

 

[Argent Hellion]

Sorry for not being around to provide prompt responses to all the inquiries...

Ok, first thing's first: my fantasy world works on a relative low-magic system. This means that, although there are magical elements within it, I do my very best to make the world feel as realistic as possible. Magic is actually the control and manipulation of energy of certain shape (Fire, Earth, Wind, Water, Lightning, Arcane) with a potent price. In order to give energy to something you have to take away, control or manipulate from something or somewhere else. Healing is probably the most costly, but that's a subject for another day. What I'm trying to say that magic in this world works on a very, VERY individual level and there is or never will be any way of mass-producing it.

Second, the faction that gets access to the carrier is the only faction with the capability of producing metal ships, pretty much everybody else lacks the technology for it and has to still resort to wood. The technology is the very thing that provides this particular faction the distinctive advantage. Basically it would be like inventing metal ships and steam engines in the middle ages and fighting the medieval Galleys or Galleons with Ironclads, a pretty one-sided kind of warfare.

Third, there are no extra-dimensional or any other sort of sci-fi stuff in this world, these metal ships are the very first ones of their kind. These advance ships run on power cells (that's what I'm calling them at the moment) that are basically the equivalent of either electrical or nuclear energy (I still have to decide which one to implement there) and their guns are based on air-pressure firing (over-sized airguns). As I said earlier, I try to keep the world in check with reality as much as possible.

As for the scale between the Carrier and the Hunters... I stated that the carrier would be the size of a modern aircraft carrier, while the Hunters would be approximately the size of modern aircraft, but obviously functioning like Gunboats. These Gunboats would basically be what the Turbinia was when it first set ablaze over the seas: skidding over the water with such a speed it leaves every other floating thing laughably in its wake and rewrites the naval history as a whole. Each Hunter should have no more than half a dozen crewmembers (2 drivers-navigators, 2 gunners and 2 loaders). Each Hunter would be armed with two guns, one long-range airgun as their main armament and a smaller flamethrower for close-range encounters. Their main strategy would be to quickly swarm their target, shooting it up with airguns from distance and setting it ablaze once they close in, relying on fast-paced hit-and-run tactics to outmaneuver pretty much any target.

Due to its sheer size, the carrier can survive far worse weather than any of its contemporary ship, metal or wooded. The Hunters wouldn't be able to operate under harsh weather, but honestly, no other ship than the carrier could anyways, so there's no threat there. Speaking of threat, this over-sized ship would basically assert itself as the Alpha and the Omega of the seas once constructed, towering over any other contemporary ship like a giant. Other than having numerous guns of its own for defense, it would rely on the Hunters not only as its first layer of protection but also as its eyes and ears, constantly sending them out to patrol the surrounding waters.

The carriers would be the undisputed champions of the oceans, their main asset being their Hunters rather than their guns. If you set your eyes on one and you manage to approach within its firing range, that clearly means the Hunters haven't done their job and you managed to overcome two-thirds of the carrier's threat already.

...

I left my question on several spots and so far I've been provided with several answers and a LOT of research matarial. As things currently stand, my intension is to split the Carrier into two variants:

- COMBAT CARRIER
This carrier variant would be the size of the modern aircraft carrier but it would be modeled after the Torpedo Boat Carriers. Instead of providing a hangar bay for the Hunters to sail in and out using their own propulsion, this carrier would have several cranes on both sides, which would require the Hunters to sail parallel to the carrier in order to be picked up and pulled on the deck, from which they would be transported with other cranes and internal systems. The Hunters would be dispatched the same way, by relying on those same cranes to lower them into the water at a safe distance from the carrier. Since the Hunters are picked up and lowered parallel to the carrier, they are never introduced to its wake and thus the carrier is able to perform its operations even when cruising at full speed. The carrier itself would be solely powered by power cells and would not require any sails whatsoever, to leave as much open space on the main deck as possible for efficient operating.

I'm considering providing the faction with three Combat carriers, four at most, which would be more than enough to give them all the firepower they need to dominate the oceans. As far as other ships go, mainly Destroyers and Cruisers, their main upside would be that they require less manpower and resources to maintain, the Carriers would be the hard-hitters but they wouldn't be doing everything. The Cruisers would be the largest ships available to the faction, since the Carrier and Hunter combo would make Battleships pointless. Why bother loading a hulking behemoth with large, slow-firing guns that are a definitive overkill at whatever they hit, and also expose the ship in its entirety to risk in every engagement when you can apply smaller guns to a bunch of small and lightning-fast ships that could swarm your enemy in seconds and shred it apart like starved-out Piranhas while applying a fraction of your resources and manpower and never exposing the main ship at risk.


- SUPPLY CARRIER
This carrier would be the size of three modern aircraft carriers driven in parallel and tied together with an overhead deck, basically it would be a giant Trimaran ship. Unlike its combat counterpart, this carrier would function as a naval supply base, sort of a naval town, allowing smaller ships to come and go as they please to trade and resupply. Rather than relying on cranes, this carrier would have numerous hangar bays underneath its main deck, on the inner sides of its multihulls. Because of the challenge of having to sail underneath the carrier in order to board it and having to fight the carrier's wake while doing so, this carrier would be as much of a stationary object as possible, using sails or its engines only to maintain its heading to wherever it's intended to be floating. While smaller ships would be able to sail and dock underneath it, larger ships with higher sails would have to send out their smaller counterparts or dock alongside the carrier.

Needless to say, the faction should only have access to a SINGLE supply carrier and, most notably, it would be mostly sailing in friendly waters. Of course, it would have its own detachment of Hunters for patrolling and protection, but it would require escort when moving even through a slightly questionable area.

The idea is still a work in progress and I'm glad I've been provided with quite the feedback for it
Thanks to everyone who's pouring in the brainpower and keep the ideas going, maybe something more comes out of this.

 

[Mad Swede]

Sorry for not being around to provide prompt responses to all the inquiries...
...
As for the scale between the Carrier and the Hunters... I stated that the carrier would be the size of a modern aircraft carrier, while the Hunters would be approximately the size of modern aircraft, but obviously functioning like Gunboats. These Gunboats would basically be what the Turbinia was when it first set ablaze over the seas: skidding over the water with such a speed it leaves every other floating thing laughably in its wake and rewrites the naval history as a whole. Each Hunter should have no more than half a dozen crewmembers (2 drivers-navigators, 2 gunners and 2 loaders). Each Hunter would be armed with two guns, one long-range airgun as their main armament and a smaller flamethrower for close-range encounters. Their main strategy would be to quickly swarm their target, shooting it up with airguns from distance and setting it ablaze once they close in, relying on fast-paced hit-and-run tactics to outmaneuver pretty much any target.

Due to its sheer size, the carrier can survive far worse weather than any of its contemporary ship, metal or wooded. The Hunters wouldn't be able to operate under harsh weather, but honestly, no other ship than the carrier could anyways, so there's no threat there. Speaking of threat, this over-sized ship would basically assert itself as the Alpha and the Omega of the seas once constructed, towering over any other contemporary ship like a giant. Other than having numerous guns of its own for defense, it would rely on the Hunters not only as its first layer of protection but also as its eyes and ears, constantly sending them out to patrol the surrounding waters.

The carriers would be the undisputed champions of the oceans, their main asset being their Hunters rather than their guns. If you set your eyes on one and you manage to approach within its firing range, that clearly means the Hunters haven't done their job and you managed to overcome two-thirds of the carrier's threat already.

Suggest you look up what the French called "la jeune ecole", in terms of naval warfare. There's an old military adage: "if you can't win, change the rules", and that was what the French intended to do. The Royal Swedish Navy works on this principle too...

- COMBAT CARRIER
This carrier variant would be the size of the modern aircraft carrier but it would be modeled after the Torpedo Boat Carriers. Instead of providing a hangar bay for the Hunters to sail in and out using their own propulsion, this carrier would have several cranes on both sides, which would require the Hunters to sail parallel to the carrier in order to be picked up and pulled on the deck, from which they would be transported with other cranes and internal systems. The Hunters would be dispatched the same way, by relying on those same cranes to lower them into the water at a safe distance from the carrier. Since the Hunters are picked up and lowered parallel to the carrier, they are never introduced to its wake and thus the carrier is able to perform its operations even when cruising at full speed. The carrier itself would be solely powered by power cells and would not require any sails whatsoever, to leave as much open space on the main deck as possible for efficient operating.

That won't work. Firstly, you can't put long enough jibs on the cranes to keep the hunter boats out of the bow wake, at least not without making the carrier unstable - you get too much weight topside and that weight is too far (in height and width terms) from the centre of gravity and the centre of bouyancy. Secondly, it is extremely difficult to lift a small moving boat out of the water like that, in fact its almost impossible. Your carrier would have to come almost to a halt before lifting the hunter boats on board. For an example, watch a video of a pilot being picked up or dropped off from a ship - you'll see that the ship slows to only 3 or 4 knots to do this. There's no other way it can be done safely given the size of the pilot cutter - and a modern pilot cutter is about the size of the hunter boats you have in your world.

- SUPPLY CARRIER
This carrier would be the size of three modern aircraft carriers driven in parallel and tied together with an overhead deck, basically it would be a giant Trimaran ship. Unlike its combat counterpart, this carrier would function as a naval supply base, sort of a naval town, allowing smaller ships to come and go as they please to trade and resupply. Rather than relying on cranes, this carrier would have numerous hangar bays underneath its main deck, on the inner sides of its multihulls. Because of the challenge of having to sail underneath the carrier in order to board it and having to fight the carrier's wake while doing so, this carrier would be as much of a stationary object as possible, using sails or its engines only to maintain its heading to wherever it's intended to be floating. While smaller ships would be able to sail and dock underneath it, larger ships with higher sails would have to send out their smaller counterparts or dock alongside the carrier.

You have a real structural challenge here, and that is making the giant trimaran flexible enough to withstand the wave motion in storms yet at the same time strong enoug to support all the functions and stores you want on it. There's a reason they don't make oil rigs that big.

 

[Saigonnus]

How about this? Near the back of the ship on both sides, you have drop ramps for the hunters to leave the interior (kind like how pocket carriers disembark hovercraft). Even on a ship that size, you can take on enough water into that hangar bay so they can leave under their own power, and then you either pump out the water, or just seal the ramps again for when they return.

 

[Patrick-Leigh]

Extra-Dimensional Spaces to house the hunters... and a portal from the interior leading directly to the waters outside the hull. That of course assuming magic is a thing. The only downside I can imagine is if one of these massive ships is destroyed, breaching those extradimensional spaces, then it would probably destroy EVERYTHING in the area, ally or enemy.

That's actually what I was going to suggest. In my story setting, I have something like that. It's a flintlock fantasy, so you have the classic ships-of-the-line, frigates, and sloops of the age of the sail. Naval vessels in particular will have magical systems that can generate Rifts (temporary Portals) that connect to a base where Harpies or Merfolk allied with the humanoid navy are located. When they're needed, the Rift is opened and the Harpies or Merfolk come through, then use the Rift to return to their base when they're done. Of course, there are Spells that opposing ships can use to try to jam the Rift so it cannot be used and the longer the Rift is open, the more Aethyr it consumes, which means there's less magic energy to be put toward other magical systems on the vessel, like the defensive Shields and Wards. Thus, a major limitation on the whole setup is power management. (As for the reason magic isn't used to power something like a paddlewheel or propeller, it's because the noise those generate attracts Sea Monsters, so until they can find a way to magically silence that form of propulsion without using up all their Aethyr supply, they're stuck with sails.)

 

[Saigonnus]

That's actually what I was going to suggest. In my story setting, I have something like that. It's a flintlock fantasy, so you have the classic ships-of-the-line, frigates, and sloops of the age of the sail. Naval vessels in particular will have magical systems that can generate Rifts (temporary Portals) that connect to a base where Harpies or Merfolk allied with the humanoid navy are located. When they're needed, the Rift is opened and the Harpies or Merfolk come through, then use the Rift to return to their base when they're done. Of course, there are Spells that opposing ships can use to try to jam the Rift so it cannot be used and the longer the Rift is open, the more Aethyr it consumes, which means there's less magic energy to be put toward other magical systems on the vessel, like the defensive Shields and Wards. Thus, a major limitation on the whole setup is power management. (As for the reason magic isn't used to power something like a paddlewheel or propeller, it's because the noise those generate attracts Sea Monsters, so until they can find a way to magically silence that form of propulsion without using up all their Aethyr supply, they're stuck with sails.)

His setting is low magic, so that idea went bust.

I have a high magic fantasy story that uses airships in a similar way to how carriers are used in the modern world, as hubs of surveillance and control. They aren't quite as big (maybe twice the size of those old galleons) and they have a unit of aerial fighters equipped with flight charms and gliders, they also wear feather fall charms in case they fall overboard, or something happens to their glider and/or ship.

 

[Argent Hellion]

As far as the carrier being unstable goes, the Hunter's weight is negligible due to the size difference between the two. Again, the carrier is the size of a modern aircraft carrier (the largest class) while the Hunters are basically gunboats the size of standard aircraft fighters. I also did mention that most of the Hunters would be stored within the carrier, once the cranes do their work and bring them onboard an internal platform system would carry them deeper into the inside.

If the cranes can be extended far enough from the hull of the carrier to keep the Hunters safe from collision during offloading and onloading operations, these operations can be done while the carrier is going at full speed. The Hunters are the one's to adapt to the positioning of the carrier due to them being far smaller, far more agile and far faster. Instead of using grappling hands or any similar devices, each crane would simply lower two hooks which would be latched on the hooking rings built into the Hunters, the crew of the Hunters would be the ones doing the hooking.

Yeah, the Trimaran seems to be an overkill once I put the comparisons down on paper, it would be far too cumbersome and its cons would weigh out its benefits. I initially thought Trimaran ships would have quite some height inbetween their main deck and the waterline compared to the Catamaran, but now that I've done more research that doesn't seem to be the case. The best course of action would be to revert back to the Catamaran, so the supply carrier would be double the size of the combat carrier.

PS EDIT: The cranes for embarking and disembarking the Hunters must be placed at the middle of the ship and towards the front side of it. If the cranes are placed anywhere near the rear of the ship, the Hunters will be at serious risk of being caught up in the carrier's wake, which would make the crane operations much more difficult and even puts the Hunters at risk of toppling over if the wake is strong enough.

 

[Mad Swede]

As far as the carrier being unstable goes, the Hunter's weight is negligible due to the size difference between the two. Again, the carrier is the size of a modern aircraft carrier (the largest class) while the Hunters are basically gunboats the size of standard aircraft fighters. I also did mention that most of the Hunters would be stored within the carrier, once the cranes do their work and bring them onboard an internal platform system would carry them deeper into the inside.

I think that perhaps you need to read up a bit about naval architecture, and in particular what is meant by metacentric height and how that affects stability. The weight of one hunter may be negligable, the weight of thirty or forty of them certainly isn't. Even less so when they're fully fuelled and loaded. Your cranes will need very long jibs to keep the hunters out of the bow wake (see below) and that will have an impact on stability.

If the cranes can be extended far enough from the hull of the carrier to keep the Hunters safe from collision during offloading and onloading operations, these operations can be done while the carrier is going at full speed. The Hunters are the one's to adapt to the positioning of the carrier due to them being far smaller, far more agile and far faster. Instead of using grappling hands or any similar devices, each crane would simply lower two hooks which would be latched on the hooking rings built into the Hunters, the crew of the Hunters would be the ones doing the hooking.

Really? You've never tried manouvering a small boat at speed have you?

We have small attack craft like your hunters in the Royal Swedish Navy, and some of them we use to transport troops around the archipelagos at 40-50 knots. My son was in the RSwN and he is a trained fast attack craft helmsman. Only when you have sat behind the helmsman/woman racing though a narrow sound (say 4 metres wide) at 45 knots do you even begin to understand the level of skill needed and how small the margins of error are. And to show you what I mean, here is a video clip from 43 Battalion Swedish National Guard in Gothenburg.

The sort of manouvre you seem to expect your hunters to do in order to hook up to the crane is going to be nigh on impossible in practice. Quite apart from how long the crane jib needs to be to keep the hunters out of the bow wake, you're asking the crew to approach at speed and then hook up. If we assume your carrier has similar size and speed to a modern USN aircraft carrier then full speed is about 35 knots. That means your hunter is going to have to approach at something like 50 knots, match its speed to that of the carrier, hook up and then be lifted out of the water. When it comes oput of the water it swill start to swing. Putting a hunter into the water will be worse, because as soon as part of it hits the water it will start to drag backwards. This is why you always slow down when you're putting a small RIB in or out of the water from a ship - there's no other way of doing it safely.

Yeah, the Trimaran seems to be an overkill once I put the comparisons down on paper, it would be far too cumbersome and its cons would weigh out its benefits. I initially thought Trimaran ships would have quite some height inbetween their main deck and the waterline compared to the Catamaran, but now that I've done more research that doesn't seem to be the case. The best course of action would be to revert back to the Catamaran, so the supply carrier would be double the size of the combat carrier.

You still have the same structural issues to solve.

PS EDIT: The cranes for embarking and disembarking the Hunters must be placed at the middle of the ship and towards the front side of it. If the cranes are placed anywhere near the rear of the ship, the Hunters will be at serious risk of being caught up in the carrier's wake, which would make the crane operations much more difficult and even puts the Hunters at risk of toppling over if the wake is strong enough.

You don't understand. The wake of a ship has two components, the bow wake (or bow wave as some call it) and the stern wake. The size of the wake depends on and increases with the speed and size of the ship.

 

[Prince of Spires]

If we assume your carrier has similar size and speed to a modern USN aircraft carrier then full speed is about 35 knots.

I think this is a very dangerous assumption. It would be treating a sail powered / ironclad ship in the same manner as a fantasy writer does when he treats a horse like a car. For a sailing ship that size or an early steampowered ironclad 10 knots would be a good speed. The HMS Victory (a ship of the line from 1765) could do 8 knots, the Napoleon (the first steam powered battleship) managed 12 knots and one of the earliest steampowered ironclads got up to 13 knots. So, if you're going for realism then the absolute top end, speed wise, would be 15 knots, and even that is pushing it. 10 would be better and for a ship that size with limited technology I could even see 5 knots as a pretty fast speed.

Another problem if we're talking sailing ships is how to actually get the hunters into a docking bay of some sorts. If the carrier is moving, then I have a hard time seeing how a sailing ship will manage to get into a bay of some sorts. There will be little wind behind a ship that size, and what wind there is will be unpredictable. Which makes sailing into the interior of the ship difficult if not to say impossible. Which means you have to resort to rowing and there your top speed will be low for a ship not purpose built as a rowing vessel.

 

[Vaporo]

Perhaps the carrier has a double-hulled catamaran style design. When the hunters are picked up, they just maneuver into the "bay" between the two hulls. There could be a cable stretched between the hulls for which "tow hooks" on the hunters could be raised to catch it as they sail between, similar to the arresting wire landing system on an IRL aircraft carrier. The carrier could simply "catch" hunters as they sail through. It solves the issue of extremely long jibs on the cranes, since whatever mechanism lifts the hunters out of the water can now be suspended from the (necessarily extremely sturdy) superstructure that spans the two hulls.

Personally, I think you're overestimating just how dangerous the wake would be to the hunters. Have you seen what nonsense that coast guard cutters (which I imagine are roughly the size of your hunters) can get away with?

For deployment, you could have the hunters suspended between the hulls or off the side of the hulls, maybe both. When it's time for launch, just release the hooks and drop them into the water.

 

[Mad Swede]

I think this is a very dangerous assumption. It would be treating a sail powered / ironclad ship in the same manner as a fantasy writer does when he treats a horse like a car. For a sailing ship that size or an early steampowered ironclad 10 knots would be a good speed. The HMS Victory (a ship of the line from 1765) could do 8 knots, the Napoleon (the first steam powered battleship) managed 12 knots and one of the earliest steampowered ironclads got up to 13 knots. So, if you're going for realism then the absolute top end, speed wise, would be 15 knots, and even that is pushing it. 10 would be better and for a ship that size with limited technology I could even see 5 knots as a pretty fast speed.

Another problem if we're talking sailing ships is how to actually get the hunters into a docking bay of some sorts. If the carrier is moving, then I have a hard time seeing how a sailing ship will manage to get into a bay of some sorts. There will be little wind behind a ship that size, and what wind there is will be unpredictable. Which makes sailing into the interior of the ship difficult if not to say impossible. Which means you have to resort to rowing and there your top speed will be low for a ship not purpose built as a rowing vessel.

If we're going to talk about realism then the idea of a ship the size of a modern aircraft carrier (which is what Argent Hellion is talking about) can't be built using the technology of the mid-1800s. And you certainly can't build a giant catamaran or trimaran, nor can you build a ship with any form of docking bay or cranes capable of lifting the hunter ships out of the water.

The question we're really discussing is how much Argent Hellion can suspend belief before the readers say "phooey" and toss the book away. I'm trying to argue for a reasonable degree of realism, at least in terms of how the various ships are designed and how you get the hunters onboard the carrier.

 

[Argent Hellion]

Thanks for providing detailed information on the last several replies, that's undoubtedly the most valuable feedback I got since I began asking the question.

Yes, unfortunately, my life boils down to a struggling existence in the forsaken ass end of nowhere, morally dubious and rather farcical country that's defined as the inoperable tumor of Europe by countless sources (just google "BIH" and you'll instantly see why). The most complex naval vessel I ever managed to set foot on is a 3-ton river barge carrying cars over the river flowing next to our village.

Any vessel larger than that know of I only read about in books, seen in videos and video games so I genuinely have no idea how to maneuver them, let alone construct them. The fact that I'm creating a fantasy world does allow me to bend the rules of reality, but I genuinely feel that the more my fantasy world is grounded in reality the audience would take it more seriously, because that's how I'd want it. That's why it's my intention to lower the bending of reality we know as much as possible when it comes to anything not revolving the characters.

The technology for creating metal ships is relatively young at the time of my writing, so only the strongest faction has access to it while everybody else still has to rely on wooden ships. It would basically be like discovering a way to build early 20th century era ships (slightly before ww1) and have them battling it out against Frigates, Galleys and Galleons of the late medieval period, which is blatantly overpowered. Add to that the fact that the strongest faction has access to pressurized weapons over ballistae (because gunpowder and explosives do not exist in this world, air-guns are the newest form of weaponry) you quickly get the picture why this faction is feared and hated by pretty much everyone else.

The way I currently see things, the best course of action would be to strictly focus on the Catamaran build, because it provides more stability than a single hull build and it also provides more carrying capacity, which comes very useful since I want the carrier to have multiple squadrons of Hunters onboard. A single aircraft carrier is perfectly capable of sailing on its own, so a carrier that consists of two merged carriers isn't that farfetched. The Japanese actually did this sort of thing with the I-400 class submarine series when they merged two submarines into one and those things worked out perfectly fine. If two full-sized, merged carriers seems too large and to unbelievable to fathom I could simply scale them down a bit, the real question then would be how much downscaling would be required to still retain the idea of having a carrier and hunters combo instead of having battleships.

The idea of Hunters being loaded in and out from in-between the hulls beneath the main deck seems less plausible the more research and thinking I invest into it. After researching the Catamaran ships a bit more I noticed that most of them do not seem to have that high of a clearing from their lowest midsection point and the waterline. Furthermore, having the Hunters approach the carrier from a single point of entry would create a funnel and slow down operations significantly. The way I see it, it seems far smoother to lower the entire ship for the sake of stability, give it three cranes on each side so the carrier has six cranes in total to work with, space them out far enough so they don't get in the way of each-other and allow the carrier to handle six Hunters at once. This would mean that the effective size of a Hunter squadron would have to be fixed at six, which isn't much of an issue.

Okay, now that you provided actual speeds of sailing ships the carrier would be pitted against, it seems rather obvious that it could outrun them without breaking a sweat and that the Hunters could be running circles around them with comical ease, which is exactly what I want to happen. I honestly thought the speed gap would be a bit smaller. The main idea behind the combat scenario is that, once the enemy fleet spots a single Hunter scouting the horizon, their best bet would be to scatter and cross their fingers in hopes the Hunters wouldn't head in their particular direction or the Carrier itself wouldn't stumble upon them, which would be even worse.

Having such an overwhelming speed advantage makes it unnecessary for the carrier to maintain full speed during operations with its Hunters, especially since having six cranes on the carrier enables it to service the entire squadron simultaneously and it would dramatically cut down on time. For the time-being, I'd say that 10 knots (which equates to 20 Km/h if the math serves me right) sounds smooth enough for loading operations.

PS EDIT: In all honesty, to give the sailed ships a bit of a better chance, I'm actually considering increasing their speeds, or lowering the speeds of the Carrier and the Hunters. The offensive weaponry of the sailing ships will also receive an upgrade, as much as you can improve on the concept of a ballista without switching to gunpowder anyways, so if they do decide to put up a fight they could cause harm to the Hunters, but they would still end up defeated.

 

[skip.knox]

>their best bet would be to scatter
Given that they would all be under the same wind, scattering wouldn't be quite random. One direction would be much slower than the other. It would be an unpopular captain who chose the slower!