One of the first issues that designers had to content with was a lack of experience. The only aircraft carriers built in Britain in the last 20 years were the 3 ships of the INVINCIBLE class. These were small light carriers without such complicated things like aircraft catapults and arrestor wires and angled flight decks. The last “conventional” carrier was the MAJESTIC class HMS HERCULES which had been completed in 1961. Even then that particular ship had been launched in 1945 and immediately laid up uncompleted when the end of the war made her surplus to requirements. In 1957 she had been taken in hand for completion but even something as theoretically simple as fitting out the empty hulk had taken four years. HERCULES had been subsequently sold to India where she was still serving as INS VIKRANT (It was known that the Indian’s where starting to look for a replacement).
The last time the Royal Navy had attempted to build a large conventional carrier was the CVA 01 program that had been cancelled while it was still on the drawing board in 1966.
The upshot was there was no one involved with the project who had any practical experience in designing or building the kind of large aircraft carrier that was demanded. This actually had a significant influence on the final design as the designers were forced to start from scratch rather than producing an evolution of an existing design as was often seen with other warship types.
I'd like to highlight this passage, because it helps illustrate the short-sightedness of British governments over the last century in maintaining their defence industrial base. And it's entirely on point, because we saw the same thing happen in OTL when it came time last decade to design the
Queen Elizabeths, too. A lot of things had to be re-learned (or cribbed from abroad).
It first occurred with the Washington Naval Treaty and Britain's acceptance of the 10 year building holiday for capital ships. The Treasury certainly liked it, because of the huge short-term savings it promised; but no one seems to have reflected on what that would do to the design and building skillsets needed to lay down advanced capital warships. Britain lost a lot of that base, and never really got it all back. It would have been far smarter to rework the Treaty to permit some minimal cycle of capital ship replacement, to keep their designers' hands in the game, and keep at least a couple major yards with the necessary skillsets working.
Of course, in the Cold War and post-Cold War it's not going to be possible (given the enormous costs of modern carriers/amphibious assault ships) to maintain anything close to that tempo, but when you're going full generations without designing or laying down even a single capital ship, that's a problem.
Of course, the problem cannot be confined to the RN/MoD (which has fought and lost some of these battles for ship procurement, after all). It's a more fundamental problem of contemporary democratic politics, and not just in Britain.
