Medieval fantasy ship carrier

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...

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.