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We seem to of had a spate of aircraft carrier threads lately and they got me thinking, never a good idea. :) With previous naval treaties nations had been limited to carriers with a maximum standard displacement of 27,000 tons and a maximum total standard tonnage per navy - 135,000 tons each for Britain and the US, 81,000 tons for Japan, and 60,000 tons each for France and Italy. By the time of the conclusion of the Second London Naval Treaty in 1936 however this had changed with the maximum total tonnage displacement for carriers having been scrapped and the maximum displacement for each carrier reduced to 23,000 tons. This is illustrated in the Royal Navy by all of the carriers laid down in the years before WWII having kept to the 23,000 ton limit only increasing with the Audacious-class at 36,800 tons after the war had started.

So what if the individual maximum displacement were slightly higher than our timeline's by 2,000 tons at 25,000 tons? The British negotiators apparently wanted to make it even lower at 22,000 tons but had to give way when other nations at the conference objected and accept the extra 1,000 tons maximum displacement. For the sake of this thread assume that people objected even more strenuously and the British negotiators felt that they had to accept a larger maximum displacement of what turned out to be half way between our timeline's agreed upon figure and the old one. What do people think the various navies would do with an extra 2,000 tons in hand to play with - simply slightly heavier variants of our timeline's carriers or something radically different?
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