AHC: WW2 "Super Carriers"

What tonnage do you get by scaling up an armoured carrier to operate the realistic maximum number of OTL WW2 aircraft (80?) and store them all in hangars?
 
What tonnage do you get by scaling up an armoured carrier to operate the realistic maximum number of OTL WW2 aircraft (80?) and store them all in hangars?
You get the Audacious Class, as planned.
A slightly beamier Illustrious, allowing aircraft to be stored 4 abreast instead of 3, and 2 hangar decks, each 17ft 6in.
78-100 aircraft, 33-36,000 tons.
 
The likely candidate for such a beast would be the US where they consider the design as an answer for Pacific operations if they lost Australia or Hawaii, or perhaps Atlantic if UK is lost (a certain operation named for a maritime mammal considered feasible in some panic?)
That was the sort of scenario I was thinking about. What if the US Navy starts thinking about what would happen if they lost an island base in the pacific or England is knocked out of the war. So let's say you get at least one Midway class style carrier. Maybe the concept of the super carrier is that it carries scout planes taken from battleships/cruisers in addition to a normal air wing (fighters, torpedo and dive bomber).
After Pearl Harbor and the start of Pacific offensive the concept of the Midway carrier changes. The new concept is that the "Super Essex" can carry in addition to it's air wing a squadron of Marine aircraft. The Marines can fly off once an air strip is ready for them andcarrier can go on with normal operations. The regular Essex carriers are for offensive use. The '"Super Essex" remains on station providing air support for an island invasion similar to the OTL aircraft carrier mission in Korea and Vietnam.
 
How about this as a scenario? The Doolittle raid is more or less (take your pick) effective than OTL and a study is done to see if it's feasible to build a carrier designed to operate medium or heavy bombers. Perhaps after the heavy resistance and losses early in the Pacific island hopping campaign it's thought that these bomber carriers will be needed when the US invades the Japanese home islands. They would likely be commissioned at the end of the war and not see any actual combat.
 
You get the Audacious Class, as planned.
A slightly beamier Illustrious, allowing aircraft to be stored 4 abreast instead of 3, and 2 hangar decks, each 17ft 6in.
78-100 aircraft, 33-36,000 tons.

Wiki suggests 60 aircraft as built and 37,000 t...

Still, enlarging the design to carry 80 aircraft probably only gets you to 45k or so.
 
Wiki suggests 60 aircraft as built and 37,000 t...

Still, enlarging the design to carry 80 aircraft probably only gets you to 45k or so.

That's incorrect.

She was designed for 80-odd late war planes (i.e. bigger than at the start of the war)

She was to be around 32kt light.
 
Have some routine political maneuvering in the Imperial Japanese Navy go horribly wrong and the battleship proponents wind up getting arrested ,purged or commiting suicide.Putting the Carrier boys in charge of the Navy just after the Yamato and Mushasi are laid down and have them completed as a carriers.
 
What about my idea of a Montana hull being converted to a CV in a scare over Japanese mega-carriers (akin to what led to the building of the Alaskas)?
 
You would need a hybrid BB-Carrier like one of the Gibbs & Cox designs for the Soviets. Twelve 16" guns and 36 fixed wing a/c. 74K tons IIRC.
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Working on the principle of a carrier for c. 100, but without early jet development etc, how viable a concept would a long endurance carrier, perhaps carrying larger bombers (a worthwhile number of twin engine Mosquito size aircraft or bigger?) plus the usual fighters for air defence and lighter operations be?

My thinking would be a carrier with large bunkers to support extended time from port, whilst also carrying a force of longer ranged aircraft with bigger bomb loads. We avoid the issues of too large a number of aircraft on a ship, but the carrier would still need to be pretty big to carry bigger airframes and the fuel plus ordnance load. You might be looking towards 70k then, especially if you then armour it up too.

The likely candidate for such a beast would be the US where they consider the design as an answer for Pacific operations if they lost Australia or Hawaii, or perhaps Atlantic if UK is lost (a certain operation named for a maritime mammal considered feasible in some panic?)

I was thinking this too--don't have a big carrier for lots of little planes, have one for smaller numbers of really big planes. As someone else said also, sort of being able to do a Doolittle Raid at will, and being able to recover the bombers. So you want a deck big enough for B-17s, if not indeed B-29s, to operate off of routinely, hence the gigantism. And as mentioned for lots of fuel for lots of range.

Mainly just to enable big planes to take off and land at all, frankly. Trying to carry more fuel for extra range is futile if the screening task force of cruisers, destroyers and maybe even a battleship cannot go the distance with you. Better to concentrate on maximizing firepower, in the form of AV-Gas and munitions for the planes, and rely on auxiliary ships to keep bringing fuel. (Then again, at sea replenishment was still a pretty undeveloped art in those days, wasn't it?)

Now then the other question is, who in the world could possibly afford to undertake to make such a monster and clearly it seems only the USA could. So we'd have to ask, would it seem rational for us to do it, even fearing loss of forward bases? Or would we reason that spending the money on several Essex sized things, or a whole squadron of baby flattops and other smaller craft, would allow us more cost-effectively to take back necessary forward bases one by one and be more generally useful all around?

It would seem that despite the inspiring example of Doolittle's Raid, one never hears, in all the fantasy wargaming, of a lobby for a big deck just to handle bigger planes, and if anyone even raised the proposal, it was set aside pretty quickly. When the Admirals later wanted bigger carriers, they wanted them for swarms of small (if much heavier than before, due to the lifting power of jet planes) aircraft just as Calbear says you never need more than 100 of. Or anyway, can't manage more than 100 of. They did not want to make a big deck to put a squadron or two of big or even by WWII standard medium bombers (Mitchell, Marauder--two engine fast/heavy armored types) on. They did develop an unusually large plane for nuclear weapon delivery but it was not bigger than WWII era mediums I don't think.
 
The Essex class operated 80 to 100 aircraft and there is a limit to how many aircraft a carrier can operate successfully.

Not quite sure why the Alaska class gets slagged here. They were designed for a specific purpose: to counter Japanese and German commerce raiding pocket battleships and cruisers. German threat was gone by 1943 but Japanese cruisers were still a threat till 1945. Construction was started when these threats existed but were gone by the time they were ready for combat.
 

SsgtC

Banned
The Essex class operated 80 to 100 aircraft and there is a limit to how many aircraft a carrier can operate successfully.

Not quite sure why the Alaska class gets slagged here. They were designed for a specific purpose: to counter Japanese and German commerce raiding pocket battleships and cruisers. German threat was gone by 1943 but Japanese cruisers were still a threat till 1945. Construction was started when these threats existed but were gone by the time they were ready for combat.
Oh God. Now you've gone and done it. You're about to call the bear down on this thread
 
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