She's a hybrid of County and a bigger version of the real Hermes - complete with island, spotting tops, directors and the rest.
In the near term, she looks like a cruiser with aircraft scouting abilities - superficially ideal for foreign stations to replace a few old cruisers. She can scout or monitor activities over a wide area, launch small strikes with aircraft and finish off the job with the 8".
So... superimposed turrets at both ends, with a big hangar block in the middle, flight deck over the top of the hangar block offset to allow space for an island bridge? I'm still struggling to see how they fit 26 aircraft (even 1920s models) into such a small space, given that was roughly how many Eagle operated OTL and she was over 20,000 tons and a dedicated carrier. Presumably two hangar decks one above the other? It would make for rather a tall superstructure on a fairly slim hull. Avoid taking her into any Indian Ocean typhoons.
More generally, there's a difference between aircraft-as-scouts and aircraft-as-strike-force. As long as you're only loading lightweight 1920s scout planes, you can fit them into quite a small space and for independent cruiser operations (whether patrol, hunter, escort or raider) they're extremely useful because they give a huge increase in search radius at a relatively low cost. Likewise for the traditional cruiser-as-fleet-scout - yes, having to stop to launch/recover the seaplanes is a pain, but the bonus of having half-a-dozen eyes buzzing around at 10,000 feet and 100mph 20 or 50 miles ahead of your cruiser screen more than makes up for it. Hence I can see the attraction of a cruiser that can launch and recover aircraft in all reasonable weathers and doesn't have to stop to do it. Of course, once you move on from scout planes to high-performance fighters (with their high landing speeds) and heavy attack planes struggling to get off the deck with a load of 1000lb bombs or torpedoes, well, you're gonna need a bigger deck.
The other issue is that, although nobody knows it as yet, the cruiser role in the battle fleet is shifting from fleet scout to fleet escort (and destroyer leader/destroyer-killer more generally), and for those roles aircraft are much less useful. Of course, with all the BCs around TTL, a 1940s war may see many fewer cruiser/destroyer taskforces built around CAs as the heavy ships.
Here is one from the second battle of Guadalcanal, although it was South Dakota's own gunfire that set her planes on fire.
en.wikipedia.org
South Dakota seems to have been the
Warspite of the US Navy - her career history is full of incident .
