Talk:Recent Updates/@comment-49.97.96.25-20140512033236/@comment-24332640-20140512221326

It's really hard to draw a sharp distinction between CAs and CAVs.

It was pretty normal for CAs to carry floatplanes for reconnaissance and spotting and Tone-class CAs always carried more aircraft than Mogami-class. So why was Mogami-class made convertible to CAVs first? It's more than a little arbitrary. You could argue that Tone-class was built specifically to be a reconnaissance aircraft platform and not for attacking, but then the primary purpose of Mogami-class's aircraft was also reconnaissance, they just didn't carry as many.

You really have to look at the actual aircraft to understand what's going on. See, the Japanese really liked the idea of having multirole floatplanes. Zuiuns, for example, were primarily for reconnaissance but they also carried a single 250kg bomb. The idea was that they could get the drop on the enemy fleet by bombing them immediately after finding them, instead of having to inform their fleet and then wait for their carriers to launch an airstrike by which time the enemy fleet would probably be aware of their presence. But they were still primarily for reconnaissance.

But wait a minute, the Aichi E13A (the Type Zero Reconnaissance Seaplane you probably have a million of and never use) could actually do the exact same thing for the same reasons. Zuiuns were just a newer design that were better at it. But their mission profiles weren't really any different. This is where the game KanColle makes a much bigger distinction between the two than reality did.

I think it's hard to make a convincing argument that Mogami-class were actually CAVs but Japan just didn't use that classification. In truth there was nothing really special about this ships with regards to their aircraft facilities. They were CAs. But I guess the game designers wanted to feature things like the Zuiun's preemptive strike capabilities but they didn't want people sticking Zuiuns on everything so they decided to call some ships CAVs and others CAs. Mogami-class got the CAV designation because they did carry Zuiuns historically.

On the other hand if you're going to argue that a CAV is nothing more than a CA with above-average seaplane capacity then Tone-class probably should have been CAVs from the start.

Sorry for writing so much...