Planes

Hey kinglad and welcome to the forum.

Indeed, a fighter can sink a cruiser. Planes can sink any ships, but remember that a plane needs an escorting destroyer to be able to sink an enemy’s submarine. That is according to the rules.

@kinglad:

would a fighter really sink a cruiser in real life

No.  The worst that a group of fighters – and especially a single fighter – could do to a WWII cruiser would be to shoot up the superstructure with its guns or cannons, thus killing men (including, potentially, the bridge crew) and damaging or destroying vulnerable equipment (like the radar gear).  Some fighters (or fighter bombers) carried small bomb loads or rockets, but these would not have sufficed to sink a cruiser.  To sink a battleship or cruiser, you basically have only two options: breach the hull in sufficent places to admit enough water to destroy its buoyancy, or penetrate the armour at the right place (and to a sufficient depth) to reach and detonate the ammunition magazines of one of the main gun turrets.  No fighter had the capability to do that with conventional weapons.  At most, a kamikaze attack by a fighter might cause serious damage and a bad fire – potentially lethal to a carrier under ideal circumstances, but probably not to a battleship or cruiser.

@CWO:

@kinglad:

would a fighter really sink a cruiser in real life

No.  The worst that a group of fighters – and especially a single fighter – could do to a WWII cruiser would be to shoot up the superstructure with its guns or cannons, thus killing men (including, potentially, the bridge crew) and damaging or destroying vulnerable equipment (like the radar gear).  Some fighters (or fighter bombers) carried small bomb loads or rockets, but these would not have sufficed to sink a cruiser.  To sink a battleship or cruiser, you basically have only two options: breach the hull in sufficent places to admit enough water to destroy its buoyancy, or penetrate the armour at the right place (and to a sufficient depth) to reach and detonate the ammunition magazines of one of the main gun turrets.  No fighter had the capability to do that with conventional weapons.  At most, a kamikaze attack by a fighter might cause serious damage and a bad fire – potentially lethal to a carrier under ideal circumstances, but probably not to a battleship or cruiser.

Basically, you summed up why the argument that transports should be defenseless because they’d never kill a sub is actually a pretty dumb argument. :-)