Duckk wrote:http://infodump.thefifthimperium.com/entry/Harrington/290/1
A few comments on that:
Of course, the reasons the Brits had armored their flight decks were that they were going to be [operating] in restricted waters (closer to land-based enemy air), that prewar shipboard antiaircraft was woefully anemic, and that the Royal Navy's aircraft -- whose design was controlled prewar by the RAF, not the Navy -- well, frankly… sucked. In short, the British Navy had little hope of defeating air attack by destroying the bases from which that attack might be launched and was forced to accept that the only way its aircraft carriers were likely to survive was to them as tough as possible. As a consequence, their air groups were much smaller, which, coupled with the inferior quality of their aircraft, would have left them at a serious disadvantage in a standup fight with their American or Japanese counterparts.
That is essentially a myth, because the primary reason for those airgroups being small (and the British navy not building more carriers despite being one of the big pioneers in using them) was simple (and very stupidly) due to there being a fixed limit to the number of aircraft that the navy was allowed to have.
Part of the insane turfwar between airforce and navy after WWI.
The second biggest reason for smaller airgroups was also not due to armouring, but instead due to the simple fact that the UK did not utilise deck parks like USA and to a lesser extent Japan did.
Modelling of the ships and the airplanes have in fact shown that if deck parks and cramming the planes together more tightly like the US did had been used, the British carriers would have been able to carry airgroups of similar size.
It should probably also be mentioned that much of the reason for the less than great aircraft designs the UK navy had was due to design requirements that even many of those meant to use them fully agreed with, for example it was felt that navigation over open waters was difficult enough that all carrier aircraft needed at least a crew of 2.
Also, the difference between carrier design is not in wether a carrier is built with wooden deck or with armoured deck, but first of all, wether the flight deck is the main deck ( usually armored ), or the hanger deck is the main deck with the flight deck built as superstructure on top of that.
And once this is understood, it is no surprise that there is still much debate on which design is better.
Superstructure design gives a number of advantages, like much fewer limits on placing aircraft elevators and being less "wetnosed".
And as long as such a carrier wasn´t actually sunk, it could usually be repaired. By spending months in a dock.
However, armoured main/flight deck gave a stronger ship in total, and bombs hitting the deck often resulted in just about nothing, hence the saying about "sweepers man your brooms", damage rarely went internal so it was just a matter of getting rid of any debris(and fire, but those tended to go out on their own eventually) from the flight deck and the carrier could resume normal operations. In a matter of minutes or hours.
Longterm however, the armoured flight decks had a nasty tendency to warp from damage and especially fires, so eventually, the carrier would have to accept a slower top speed to compensate, and repairing this was pretty much a waste of resources, it was cheaper to build a new carrier from zero.
Which means that surprisingly, USA and UK both choose the design more suitable for them, despite not understanding their good/bad sides at the time of making those choices.
UK had few carriers that they needed to stay alive, while USA had the economical option of building many, and could afford to rotate damaged ones back to docks for months or even years of repairs.
That meant the "full-deck strike" she could launch was smaller than the ones her larger sisters could launch, and that whereas Enterprise was designed to carry over 90 aircraft, Ranger was designed to carry only 72. In other words, she was a less effective, less efficient vessel as an aircraft carrier than any of her consorts…. which is the main reason she spent the entire war in the Atlantic, where she wasn't going to go up against anybody else's carriers.
It was also because the Ranger was pretty much USAs only failed carrier design of WWII or the runup to it. It had bad seakeeping and a number of smaller troubles.
Which is rather ironic as it was the first USN carrier built as a carrier from the start.
The Sara and the Lady Lex, despite preceeding the Ranger and conversions, once their 20cm guns were rid of, far superior ships.
Being twice the tonnage probably had something to do with that of course, but the ships also didn´t show any of the troubles and excentricities the Ranger ended up with.
But if you go back and look at the memos and minutes of meetings and discussions about building priorities, it becomes pretty clear that the enormous numbers of CVEs and CVLs which were ultimately ordered were more the result of pressure from the Roosevelt administration than because they were what the Navy wanted.
Quite so, because the US navy, despite being far better in this, like the IJN it was still focused on "real fighting", protecting merchants and transports wasn´t cool enough (nor did it provide easily displayed "kills" to justify costs).
In the event, it turned out that the Navy had a point, and hundreds of destroyer escorts were canceled at the end of the war.]
That was more due to no longer being needed, than being a bad design choice by itself, at the time the choice was made.
Building better ships ALMOST as fast simply isn´t good enough when your primary ally is a hairswidth from disaster.
There´s also the major issue that there was a distinct shortage of certain engine components, meaning that building larger ships would either have resulted in SLOWER ships, or greater delays.
And this is even more true when looking at the small carriers, many of them were simply not very good ships at all. Didn´t matter, their arrival in numbers was one of the things that killed the German submarine war.
Building fewer, larger carriers would instead have made them primary targets for the submarines, as then it would have been a relatively simple way to remove a LOT of important assets(the aircrafts) from a convoy.
And it wasn´t until there were plenty of CVEs that it became realistic to have hunter killer groups that were not part of the convoys.
But ships that size cost a lot of money, and there are constant suggestions and arguments that the "super carriers" are simply too big, too expensive, and too vulnerable, for even the United States to afford. Better that we should invest in a greater number of smaller, less capable, and (whether anyone wants to actually use the word or not) more expendable units. In other words, we're still seeing the same arguments and the same thinking as in the 1920s and 1930s dueling for supremacy when we look at the future of carrier aviation in the United States Navy today.
And the world... For example, the British brand new QE class at 70kt is almost constantly being questioned for being mostly a waste of resources.
Compare to the Italian Cavour that carries half to 3/4 the number of aircraft at well less than half the tonnage, ~30kt.
Meanwhile, Spain and Russia are looking more towards amphibious assault ships with the ability to act as a carrier as a secondary ability. Or like the French Mistral class, primarily set to merely be able to handle helicopters instead.
With Japan having the Hyuga class and soon deploying the Izumo at 14kt and 19kt, both designated as helicopter destroyers, but quite capable of carrying STOL or VTOL planes.
Pretty much just USA and UK building BIG carriers today, but the real question is just how good big vs medium vs small of the various kinds are...
) doesn't mean that's true when you are trying to fight a star nation that has thousands of starsystems. 