I was just looking over at the
Warship Projects Discussion Boards and some of their talented artists have drawn the RL IJN battleship
Shinano if she were converted to a carrier at some point during her construction, possibly in mid-1942. The guys there say she could have held an enormous number of planes...120+, making her roughly as capable as the first post-war US carriers.
Although you could argue that since
Shinano was never completed in OTL, it is difficult to say she could have been finished and properly outfitted as a carrier in time to take part in the Pacific War, lets assume that construction proceeds at, say, the speed that
Taiho was completed at in OTL. I don't have Jane's or anything like that in front of me right now, but given that
Shinano was launched but never fitted out in OTL, is March 1945 a decent date for the commissioning of
Shinano as a carrier? What would the IJN do with a carrier that late in the war?
Awesome WI line-drawing:
