Aircraft Carriers - WT Discussion

I’ll try to explain why I put what I did in the previous reply, then. There 's a few areas where I addressed your new questions, apparently not clearly enough.

There are maps already ingame which do only have aircraft carriers as landing zones, in Naval these are mostly the [Conquest] open-circle cap maps* such as Midway or Jungle.

How they work is, aircraft which cannot land or take off from them have the normal airspawn location, or can choose to be air-spawned at speed, approx. 100m above sea level directly above the carrier. Much the same is found in those Air maps which, too, only have carriers to start and rearm from - for one or both teams. Examples: [Operation] Wake Island(light vehicles), [Operation] Malta. That 100m airspawn is also automatically applied if a non-carrier-capable aircraft 's player crash lands on the carrier and is not so critically damaged as to prevent airfield repair.
*an aside, other open-cap maps such as La Manche used to not have any kind of rearm zone for aircraft, only the airspawn to start from.

I brought those up previously bc I did not understand where the idea that a player spawning a plane for SP would be somehow restricted from using it if the map only featured AI carriers as rearm zones - these already exist ingame but do not have any such limitations.

I see now that you’re talking abt this from the perspective of how a playable carrier might be implemented ?( or atleast it seems like that, correct me if I’m wrong ) The idea where a carrier would be controlled by a separate player from those using it 's aircraft mostly fell out of these discussions w/ the introduction of catapult seaplanes, since - as you noted - there 's not much relevance to playing a carrier if the carrier player cannot perform actions, i.e. directing carrier-based aircraft in offense. The seaplanes showed that having aircraft under the direct control of the player of the ship which launches them, rather than needing to be controlled each by other players, was indeed possible w/in the framework of WT.

As above. I brought these up as they exemplify how a WT aircraft carrier 's player might be able to control the aircraft their ship carries, w/o needing other players to control those.

It 's also why I pointed you towards how we’ve found playable carriers to work in War Thunder Mobile - codewise, theirs work much the same as our catapult seaplanes do, simply extending on that mechanic to allow employment of multiple aircraft at once and adding a few more basic controls on top of " orbiting " to allow those aircraft to be used in an offensive capability while the player retains direct control of the launching ship.

And, as WT and WTM share the fruits of eachothers development - including some of the carriers currently implemented here - knowing how theirs work might have some relevance to how our future additions could.

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Possibly not. You can spawn from carriers in Air EC and, as far as I’ve found, only RL carrier-based aircraft can do this; land-based can only select airfields. It’s probably due to possessing the arrestor hook, which the game already ‘knows’ is found on certain aircraft, even though there is no player control for it. So, it seems the game already knows what can and can’t operate from a carrier.

However, as you noted, whether players will be happy with such realism in Naval Realistic Battles is another matter.

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!! Aircraft Carrier control inputs have been added to the files !!

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Very very interesting and it looks remarkably similar to the suggested/speculated functions. I am also interested in the difference between attack and hunt.

My main takeaway is that it looks like that it will support multiple planes/squads in the air.

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Thats interesting are they actually planning playable CVs hmmm

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It will probably become clearer when it 's iconography and especially it 's localization is added, but to me it seems like that would be to set the selected aircraft group to automatically attack targets which enter their proximity, rather than the player manually selecting targets for them ( which is probably the purpose of the _attack / _add_attack keys ) or the aircraft group waiting for a target to enter the aircraft carrier 's proximity to attack it ( which might be what the function of _defend is ).

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I and others also pondered about many of the thing you bring up. I will just link and quote my post in the CV discussion thread. Feel free to ramble I am happy to discuss the ideas and after all this thread is for the CV discussion:

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There’s only one way I can image this.
So, to have carriers, they should be Ai controlled ships stationed at the back of the fleets. They’re Ai would be programmed to avoid bombs and torpedoes just like it happens in Air Battles. No there wouldn’t be much players to fly tons of planes. So, just when the battle starts, the carriers on both sides would launch Ai planes - fighters, dive bombers and torpedo bombers en masse. When a player selects to spawn an aircraft after getting his/her ship sunk, it would also spawn on the carrier. Landing on the carrier would be necessary to reload, refuel and rearm both player and Ai aircraft. Only one carrier would spawn each for both teams in most battles but four would spawn in open sea battles. Sinking a carrier would cause win point drop of the team which it belongs to.

Localization for ships not yet available in WT Mobile, incl. player-controlled aircraft carriers, was briefly added and included details on the refit they’ll be represented as being in:
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( https://github.com/gszabi99/War-Thunder-Mobile-Datamine/commit/eb9acb763cb36be9db76b1f9943411f588f74ecf )

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I saddly guess they gonna let France on the side (how original) when they gonna add CVs, that’s sad because even if we don’t have SO MUCH choices (like other countries), we still have somes:

Commandant-Teste, a hydroplane-carrier, could be fun for low tier:

Joffre (2 were to be built but cancelled during ww2. But one of them has been started, so it’s a possibility after the konkrast thing)

Béarn (1928)

Clémenceau (1957)
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And of course the actual one, Charles de Gaulle, only nuclear powered CV outside the USA.

And here for the curious how would looks like the next CV for France, the PANG (Scheduled for 2036)

I don’t talk about all CVs, we also got some gived by Ally country for some times.

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I think this is a very interesting way to implement player controlled Aircraft Carriers to War Thunder. Some bits of this also give me the vibes of the old Battlestations: Pacific, a game which also shows how Carriers may be feasible.

I would personally love for player controlled carriers to eventually make it to the game, as it’s a piece of history that really intrigues me. I can’t wait to control a IJN Shokaku in several years from now.

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Some quick thoughts on these before the year ends:

-USS Essex being in her earliest configuration possible makes some sense, being the lead ship of her class. Being the first carrier available to players in WTM( based on her previously added economic data ) she 's probably intended to be the benchmark " lowest " capability one, after all.

-IJN Zuikaku seems to be JPN 's " late war " carrier, but that might not be as much of a difference as it would be for other carrier-operating countries - the capabilities of her airgroup did not change as drastically over the course of the war.
The antiaircraft rocket barrage might be interesting, if it 's modelled - similar weapons have been in the files here in WT for other ships and are still unused.

-Even in her earliest configuration USS Midway is a massive increase in capability over all other carriers yet found in WT Mobile, except one: the USS Forrestal.

  • In the other direction, IJN Kaga and USS Lexington are below the capability level I was expecting aircraft carriers to begin at in WT.
    Even though Kaga is reportedly in post-reconstruction form, her airgroup at the time still looked like this:

Which, well. imo these would struggle to destroy ships that could not be done in by Kaga 's own guns, or those in that size range having virtually any antiaircraft weaponry beyond " none ".

USS Lexington(CV-2) seems to be in a similar, but slightly worse position:
Curtiss_F6C_and_Martin_T3m_on_deck_of_USS_Lexington_CV-2_1928
Again w/ the low flight performance/too-small payload airgroup, but also 1929 was a very specific year in her service: the first one for her to have close-range antiaircraft guns onboard. Six 7.62mm machineguns in two triple-mounts.

Though it 's probably no accident by WTM 's development team that they’re represented as earlier fits since they’re 8in-armed - that’ll be a noticeable capability on Mobile 's small playable areas compared to more modern AC 's. In WT …

Lexington is unusual here since her model has already been transferred to WT, where we can see that her configuration is the mid-1941 to early-1942 one - the combination of 8in gun turrets and 1.1in AA gives it away.
The capabilities of the ship and it 's airgroup over a decade later are very different from what would be implied by this year shown in the files.


Mobile is probably closer to the addition of Aircraft Carriers than we could be, they’ve now completed the addition of all battleships in the files during the Beta period( and representatives of all battleship capability progression from Dreadnought to the end too ) and have a typically monthly schedule of update release compared to WT 's DEC-MAR break. It 's possible they could be made available there as early as the end of next month, almost certainly it’ll be before the middle of 2024. When they’ll come to WT is harder to predict, though it 's reasonable( and ambiguous ) to say that it’ll be after Mobile gets them. Probably after the addition of 16in-armed battleships starts here (?)

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@Motherhen357 I’m just wondering, how likely do you think it is that playable carriers will come to both War Thunder Mobile and (after obviously longer time) to “normal” war thunder?

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Hi, thanku for the question ! After the extended control inputs were added to WT, it has appeared that this shipclass is intended to be made playable in both games.

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Names of HQ carriers in the files. Includes techtree icon and statcard extended names:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gszabi99/War-Thunder-Datamine/master/lang.vromfs.bin_u/lang/units.csv

The WW2 american carriers have refit date specified, and it does not appear that IJN Shokaku has any names for the HQ model currently.

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While it is interesting it isn’t something new, these names are there for several updates (well at least for the update before). So I wouldn’t say that this is any indicator.

Maybe it has something to with how these have secondary, AA armament modeled which is same system as player ships so they are implemented as player vessels, so they have stat cards? IDK

Thank you for so much detailed info, and keeping us up to date on game files stuff! The things in WT mobile that have yet to make it over here (WWII BBs, and especially subs and carriers) are always interesting. Hopefully it’s not too long until we see more about them!

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I’ll keep watching, just like the rest of us here. We’ll see if I’m right abt this:

In most battles no. In specific cases it would perform fine.

Size comparison of the new IJN Mutsu to the LQ IJN Ryujo, by https://www.youtube.com/@RowansWTNavalGuides/

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