What Could Have Been/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* What if the Pacific Fleet's aircraft carriers had been at Pearl Harbor on the morning of December 7, 1941?
** The losses of battleships would not have been as great because some of the firepower would have been directed at the carriers instead. The long term fallout would have been for the US to pursue a more balanced course of warfare<ref>not as carrier-centric</ref> in the Pacific that would have incorporated more and better AA capability over the fleets and more aggressive use of battleships. Japan would have eventually gotten the massive, climactic naval clash it constantly pursued for the first half of the war, but they would have faced off against a larger, combined fleet of more modern US battleships and carriers that would have still scheduled the Imperial Japanese for a date with Davy Jones, but the battleships would have done most of the heavy work to include sinking the IJN Yamato<ref>very much within the capabilities of the ''North Carolina'', ''South Dakota'' and ''Iowa'' class battleships</ref> and the rest of the Japanese heavy fleet. Also, we would have likely seen the deployment of the ''USS Montana'' class.
** The pre/early war Mark 14 Torpedo is well documented as a non-functional garbage due to a total lack of testing <ref>Among many other issues, the firing pin for the contact detonator wasn't parallel to the torpedo so upon hitting a target it would bend from the crash instead of doing its job, and the fancier detonators failed to account for the world's oceans not being homogeneous in various qualities they were tuned to</ref> and the Bureau of Ordinance refused to even discuss the possibility their wonder weapon was faulty. Several critical Japanese vessels were struck with these faulty torpedoes very early in the war. What if the damn things were tested and fixed pre-war?
** Following the end of the war, the USN would have held onto her heavy-armored fleets and her big gun firepower. As thick, battleship armor is ''easily'' able to shrug off any non-nuclear anti-ship missile or cruise missile, this would also prevent the sea-skimming anti-ship missile from becoming the dominant weapon in modern naval warfare. With a little ingenuity and heavy investment in S/VTOL fighter technology, we could have seen [[The Battlestar]] 's sea-faring counterpart, AKA [[Military Mashup Machine|the battle-carrier]] become a serious reality.
* What would have happened to the Republic of Colombia if Jorge Eliecer Gaitan wouldn't have been killed off?.
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