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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Furluge" data-source="post: 1705939" data-attributes="member: 22770">Well first of all I'll say I'm not an expert. I do enjoy my history, but I'll be the first to admit I haven't made an accurate enough study of individual battles, nor am I an encyclopedia on various ships. That being said I can comment on things I've seen in things such as flight sims, movies, and the History Channel. (The History Channel has a new show called command decisions, one that was on about a month ago was a break down of mainly the Battle of Midway.)That said first of all here is a webpage describing US carrier plane attacks against Japanese carriers in the Battle of Midway.<a href="http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/midway/mid-4k.htm" target="_blank">http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/midway/mid-4k.htm</a>You'll see there are two main attack ships mentioned, the Devistator torpedo plane and the Dauntless dive bomber. You can find some images of these planes and other naval aircraft here.<a href="http://www.daveswarbirds.com/navalwar/aircraft.htm" target="_blank">http://www.daveswarbirds.com/navalwar/aircraft.htm</a>What you'll notice is that these aren't the kind of bombers that come to mind when one normally says the word bomber. These ships are are basically a fighter craft frame modified and given one bomb or torpedo as their payload. This is because on a carrier there isn't room for the massive sized bombers that can take off from a land base. These planes would fly to their target, release their payload, then fly back to their carrier, get another one and fly back. A dive bomber is obviously named because bombs were normally dropped by diving toward the target, letting the bomb go and then pulling up on the stick so you don't go smack into the now exploding target, which shows the plane has a lot more mobility than a say, a B-17 flying fortress.Now it's true these craft aren't nimble as the dedicated fighters, but they're certainly very manuverable, especially once they're freed of their payload. And generally in anything where you aren't being a real stickler for realism, like say a video game or an RPG, they're usually treated as a fighter. And usually in sci-fi these they're both treated as fighters as well, with large missiles taking the place of bombs or torpedos. You commonly see fighters as a means to take out captial ships in lots of sci-fi series, including Star Wars, Wing Commander, and Master of Orion. The trade off for this is that the mortality rate for such is usually obscenely high.Also, the basic ships don't make a distinction between fighters and bombers in any case. I would guess that a bomber and a fighter would be the same except a bomber would have a much heavier loadout, but what would be the point, really?</blockquote>

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