xthetenth

Every single ton of carrier you put into a single hull gives you more capacity than the last one. It takes a lot of tonnage to be able to launch even one plane, let alone launch, maintain and arm one plane. If you compare the air wings of light carriers to supercarriers, the latter have a lot more air wing per ton because things like maintenance, seakeeping, launch facilities and deck space are amortized over more planes. Big missile batteries end up on their own platforms with their own superstructure optimized for radar and so on for very good reasons because the USN can afford the tonnage to make their carriers part of a task force. Lastly, VLS cells are a non-trivial cut in the flight deck, which is part of the strength deck and has to have four long cuts in it for catapults, as well as the cuts in the ship girder for the hangar exits onto the elevators. The cuts that already exist are only possible due to classified structural shenanigans of the deep wizardry sort. The Charles de Gaulle has to have a weak spot in her deck because the reactor needs refueling more frequently. As a result, when their new short catapult designs turned out to only work with literally neck-breaking accelerations, they had to cut down to two cats, and the island is way the hell forward, which sucks because that's prime real estate for spotting planes before launch. The Zumwalts are the first missile focused ships to not need the VLS cut to be in prime centerline real estate, and the way they talk about that development indicates that it's bigger than you'd think.

Ships haven't been tonnage critical since a little bit after WWII, instead they're volume critical. That's why a modern warship is an apartment building full of computers and coated in radars on top of a hull full of missile and engine. (Also this is a major factor in armor being obsoleted). Discounting the VLS and AEGIS is also probably a mistake. It allows very rapid engagement by a single coordinated system rather than Soviet/Russian style multiple systems, and packs a huge wad of missiles ready to go rather than having to wait for them to be readied from the magazines. You also get things like the Standard Missile being useful in offensive and defensive roles by dint of being a good long range anti-air missile with a lot of energy.
 
Also the USN is more worried than any other navy afloat about things like being able to spend as much time as possible at sea. Steaming to and from their destination is time spent with sailors and ships being used but producing none of the value that's their reason for existing. So seakeeping is a huge priority for the USN, and they tend to take it very seriously.
 
Given the proud tradition of secondary navies tending to use a greater fraction of displacement for armament and sitting in port until needed, the USN is doing pretty well.
 
 
Entirely agreed, but don't neglect to multiply those putative 'sorties' that lesser carriers manage by some fractional factor to represent how a ski jump leaves you choosing between a reasonable range or an actual weapons load (and if you take the latter by the former, multiply out by a factor to represent the fantastic odds of your carrier being close enough to be found and killed by real opponents).
 
 
It's probably worth considering that the battleship was obsoleted by the Essex class. Why, you might ask, is an evolutionary design what put the battleship out of business rather than some revolutionary new system that ? 24 hulls. By the end of that class, naval power was capable of tangling with land based air power if it was concentrated and well run. Coordinating with land based air was and is a huge help, but without that, the critical mass to just hunt and utterly destroy a battleship wasn't necessarily there and things like a guerre de course with battleships going into important areas at night (There's a reason Guadalcanal was a nightclub par excellence for surface fleets) were honestly totally viable.
 
The thing is that by 1945, the war wasn't about weaksauce raids into and out of enemy air cover, and careful island hopping, it was about "fuck you, we're the USN, and we're going to deploy the first proper integrated air defense setup on the high seas and dare you to come at us enough to make it count, which means mass attacks by guided munitions (human or otherwise)" And after the war, either you're deploying with or against that massed naval air power, or you don't matter (Sorry Argies but you got taken down by the British. The British. That's a geopolitical corgi-mauling considering what passes for a carrier over there).

XSB2D Destroyer with groovy top and bottom turrets, but the Navy quickly changed its mind. It wound up becoming the XBTD-2 with mixed propulsion. This was a reasonably popular thing for a bit, adding a jet instead of a rear gunner to provide rear protection by speed.
 

 
XTB2D Skypirate. Designed for the larger later carriers. Fit an R-4360 with counter rotating propellers. Could carry four torpedoes or an equivalent bomb load. Don't let the single engine fool you, the thing could carry as much as four TBFs (and they considered stuffing a jet in the back). It was about the same empty weight and had a longer wingspan than a B-25 Mitchell.
 

 
Grumman XTB2F. Yes that's a proposed carrier torpedo bomber. I'm sure you can see the biggest problem with that idea. But what I'm pretty sure you didn't notice the significance of is yes, that is a 75mm gun, and it would be accompanied by six .50 cals. And that's a radar in the wing because why not at that point. They also had a much more sensible idea for a torpedo bomber, the XTSF-1, which was a F7F modified with a TBF torpedo bay and an air to surface radar in the nose.
 

 
YP-37, an early attempt to fit a turbosupercharged inline in the Hawk airframe. Basically an abortive attempt at what the P-40 was, but with bad visibility and stability.
 

 
The SNC-1, originally the CW-22. A two seat fighter. They took the CW-21, a super lightweight fighter that got good performance at the expense of durability even when compared to the Zero, and added a rear gunner. It rather quickly became a training plane instead because that's not an awful idea.
 

 
The XP-62, the last hurrah of Curtiss-Wright fighter design. Originally promising with a R-3350 providing a ton of power going into a counterrotating prop. Got passed by because Curtiss-Wright was failing as a company with a ton of similar projects cannibalizing each other. Overall a mess.
 
NOT PICTURED: There were attempts to to add a turbosupercharger and intercooler to the P-39. One try was in a belly pod. Top speed dropped 40 mph. The next try was in a saddleback right over the cockpit. Top speed dropped by 45 mph.
 

 
This otherwise unoffensive looking sort is the XP-47H. Yep. It's a thunderbolt, testing the XIV-2220-1 16 cylinder inverted V engine. It didn't work very well. Meanwhile cleaning up and lightening the thing with a radial produced the J, which using a mass-produced engine and propeller cleared 500 mph.
 
 

 
Bell YFM-1 Airacuda. Yep, that's two gunner aimed and fired 37mm guns. To quote wiki: it was an innovative design incorporating many features never before seen in a military aircraft, as well as several never seen again. I wonder why. It'd probably be effective against bombers if it weren't for the minor problem of not being able to catch them. It relied on an independent auxiliary power unit to power both engine fuel pumps as well as all aircraft electrical systems (this is one of those features!) It functionally had three separate engines without any one the plane was a write-off.
 

 
XP-67 Moonbat. In addition to looking frankly super cool, it was supposed to be armed with 37mm cannon as a bomber destroyer. Six 37mm cannon in fact. Unfortunately actually making the thing work right was a bit much for the design staff and it had a severe tendency to overheat to the point of fire. By the time it worked, it didn't perform.
 

 
XP-71. The very definition of big American bomber killers. 82.3 foot span, 39,950 pound weight intended (two B-25s!) with two R-4360-13s with turbos and a pair of eight blade, 13.5 foot diameter contra-rotating props. Intended to climb to 25,000 feet in 12.5 minutes, make 428 mph up there and be able to get to 40,000 feet with a 3,000 mile range. The thing was supposed to be armed with two 37mm cannon and a 75mm cannon. There were only two problems. First, it wasn't really working, it was complex as could be and things were progressing slowly. Second, there weren't any bombers to hunt. Which is a shame, because I desperately wish the B-36 of fighters had been a thing.
 

 
Northrop XP-56. Cool looking plane, all-magnesium, all-welded. Unfortunately it didn't actually work and more importantly couldn't be made to work.
 

 
XF5F. Normally the nose goes in front of the wing, but Grumman does what it wants. The test performance was allegedly excellent, with it pulling away from an XF4U so fast the pilot thought the Corsair had engine trouble. Unfortunately it was a twin engine design and the Wildcat was deemed more practical, and the XF5F was going to need more design time and changes that would add weight.
 

 
Oh come on Vought. Really? This is the XF5U. Basically the idea was that there are good reasons why a wing with super long chord suck, mainly the induced drag at the very long wingtips, but if you cancel them out with the prop wash it'd totally allow for better maneuverability, roll rate and strength. It was promising but development took too long, with vibration problems in particular. They did need to break it up with a wrecking ball, so the strength was a thing that happened.
 
No points if you guessed that I have a handsome book on US WWII "fighter" (and light strike plane) development.

XSB2D Destroyer with groovy top and bottom turrets, but the Navy quickly changed its mind. It wound up becoming the XBTD-2 with mixed propulsion. This was a reasonably popular thing for a bit, adding a jet instead of a rear gunner to provide rear protection by speed.
 

 
XTB2D Skypirate. Designed for the larger later carriers. Fit an R-4360 with counter rotating propellers. Could carry four torpedoes or an equivalent bomb load. Don't let the single engine fool you, the thing could carry as much as four TBFs (and they considered stuffing a jet in the back). It was about the same empty weight and had a longer wingspan than a B-25 Mitchell.
 

 
Grumman XTB2F. Yes that's a proposed carrier torpedo bomber. I'm sure you can see the biggest problem with that idea. But what I'm pretty sure you didn't notice the significance of is yes, that is a 75mm gun, and it would be accompanied by six .50 cals. And that's a radar in the wing because why not at that point. They also had a much more sensible idea for a torpedo bomber, the XTSF-1, which was a F7F modified with a TBF torpedo bay and an air to surface radar in the nose.
 

 
YP-37, an early attempt to fit a turbosupercharged inline in the Hawk airframe. Basically an abortive attempt at what the P-40 was, but with bad visibility and stability.
 

 
The SNC-1, originally the CW-22. A two seat fighter. They took the CW-21, a super lightweight fighter that got good performance at the expense of durability even when compared to the Zero, and added a rear gunner. It rather quickly became a training plane instead because that's not an awful idea.
 

 
The XP-62, the last hurrah of Curtiss-Wright fighter design. Originally promising with a R-3350 providing a ton of power going into a counterrotating prop. Got passed by because Curtiss-Wright was failing as a company with a ton of similar projects cannibalizing each other. Overall a mess.
 
NOT PICTURED: There were attempts to to add a turbosupercharger and intercooler to the P-39. One try was in a belly pod. Top speed dropped 40 mph. The next try was in a saddleback right over the cockpit. Top speed dropped by 45 mph.
 

 
This otherwise unoffensive looking sort is the XP-47H. Yep. It's a thunderbolt, testing the XIV-2220-1 16 cylinder inverted V engine. It didn't work very well. Meanwhile cleaning up and lightening the thing with a radial produced the J, which using a mass-produced engine and propeller cleared 500 mph.
 
 

 
Bell YFM-1 Airacuda. Yep, that's two gunner aimed and fired 37mm guns. To quote wiki: it was an innovative design incorporating many features never before seen in a military aircraft, as well as several never seen again. I wonder why. It'd probably be effective against bombers if it weren't for the minor problem of not being able to catch them. It relied on an independent auxiliary power unit to power both engine fuel pumps as well as all aircraft electrical systems (this is one of those features!) It functionally had three separate engines without any one the plane was a write-off.
 

 
XP-67 Moonbat. In addition to looking frankly super cool, it was supposed to be armed with 37mm cannon as a bomber destroyer. Six 37mm cannon in fact. Unfortunately actually making the thing work right was a bit much for the design staff and it had a severe tendency to overheat to the point of fire. By the time it worked, it didn't perform.
 

 
XP-71. The very definition of big American bomber killers. 82.3 foot span, 39,950 pound weight intended (two B-25s!) with two R-4360-13s with turbos and a pair of eight blade, 13.5 foot diameter contra-rotating props. Intended to climb to 25,000 feet in 12.5 minutes, make 428 mph up there and be able to get to 40,000 feet with a 3,000 mile range. The thing was supposed to be armed with two 37mm cannon and a 75mm cannon. There were only two problems. First, it wasn't really working, it was complex as could be and things were progressing slowly. Second, there weren't any bombers to hunt. Which is a shame, because I desperately wish the B-36 of fighters had been a thing.
 

 
Northrop XP-56. Cool looking plane, all-magnesium, all-welded. Unfortunately it didn't actually work and more importantly couldn't be made to work.
 

 
XF5F. Normally the nose goes in front of the wing, but Grumman does what it wants. The test performance was allegedly excellent, with it pulling away from an XF4U so fast the pilot thought the Corsair had engine trouble. Unfortunately it was a twin engine design and the Wildcat was deemed more practical, and the XF5F was going to need more design time and changes that would add weight.
 

 
Oh come on Vought. Really? This is the XF5U. Basically the idea was that there are good reasons why a wing with super long chord suck, mainly the induced drag at the very long wingtips, but if you cancel them out with the prop wash it'd totally allow for better maneuverability, roll rate and strength. It was promising but development took too long, with vibration problems in particular. They did need to break it up with a wrecking ball, so the strength was a thing that happened.
 
No points if you guessed that I have a handsome book on US WWII "fighter" (and light strike plane) development.

Germans are a very literal people, and they got a bit confused when they heard somebody calling the radio their most effective weapon because of the indirect fire fragmentation capability.

Every single ton of carrier you put into a single hull gives you more capacity than the last one. It takes a lot of tonnage to be able to launch even one plane, let alone launch, maintain and arm one plane. If you compare the air wings of light carriers to supercarriers, the latter have a lot more air wing per ton because things like maintenance, seakeeping, launch facilities and deck space are amortized over more planes. Big missile batteries end up on their own platforms with their own superstructure optimized for radar and so on for very good reasons because the USN can afford the tonnage to make their carriers part of a task force. Lastly, VLS cells are a non-trivial cut in the flight deck, which is part of the strength deck and has to have four long cuts in it for catapults, as well as the cuts in the ship girder for the hangar exits onto the elevators. The cuts that already exist are only possible due to classified structural shenanigans of the deep wizardry sort. The Charles de Gaulle has to have a weak spot in her deck because the reactor needs refueling more frequently. As a result, when their new short catapult designs turned out to only work with literally neck-breaking accelerations, they had to cut down to two cats, and the island is way the hell forward, which sucks because that's prime real estate for spotting planes before launch. The Zumwalts are the first missile focused ships to not need the VLS cut to be in prime centerline real estate, and the way they talk about that development indicates that it's bigger than you'd think.

Ships haven't been tonnage critical since a little bit after WWII, instead they're volume critical. That's why a modern warship is an apartment building full of computers and coated in radars on top of a hull full of missile and engine. (Also this is a major factor in armor being obsoleted). Discounting the VLS and AEGIS is also probably a mistake. It allows very rapid engagement by a single coordinated system rather than Soviet/Russian style multiple systems, and packs a huge wad of missiles ready to go rather than having to wait for them to be readied from the magazines. You also get things like the Standard Missile being useful in offensive and defensive roles by dint of being a good long range anti-air missile with a lot of energy.
 
Also the USN is more worried than any other navy afloat about things like being able to spend as much time as possible at sea. Steaming to and from their destination is time spent with sailors and ships being used but producing none of the value that's their reason for existing. So seakeeping is a huge priority for the USN, and they tend to take it very seriously.
 
Given the proud tradition of secondary navies tending to use a greater fraction of displacement for armament and sitting in port until needed, the USN is doing pretty well.
 
 
Entirely agreed, but don't neglect to multiply those putative 'sorties' that lesser carriers manage by some fractional factor to represent how a ski jump leaves you choosing between a reasonable range or an actual weapons load (and if you take the latter by the former, multiply out by a factor to represent the fantastic odds of your carrier being close enough to be found and killed by real opponents).
 
 
It's probably worth considering that the battleship was obsoleted by the Essex class. Why, you might ask, is an evolutionary design what put the battleship out of business rather than some revolutionary new system that ? 24 hulls. By the end of that class, naval power was capable of tangling with land based air power if it was concentrated and well run. Coordinating with land based air was and is a huge help, but without that, the critical mass to just hunt and utterly destroy a battleship wasn't necessarily there and things like a guerre de course with battleships going into important areas at night (There's a reason Guadalcanal was a nightclub par excellence for surface fleets) were honestly totally viable.
 
The thing is that by 1945, the war wasn't about weaksauce raids into and out of enemy air cover, and careful island hopping, it was about "fuck you, we're the USN, and we're going to deploy the first proper integrated air defense setup on the high seas and dare you to come at us enough to make it count, which means mass attacks by guided munitions (human or otherwise)" And after the war, either you're deploying with or against that massed naval air power, or you don't matter (Sorry Argies but you got taken down by the British. The British. That's a geopolitical corgi-mauling considering what passes for a carrier over there).

Every single ton of carrier you put into a single hull gives you more capacity than the last one. It takes a lot of tonnage to be able to launch even one plane, let alone launch, maintain and arm one plane. If you compare the air wings of light carriers to supercarriers, the latter have a lot more air wing per ton because things like maintenance, seakeeping, launch facilities and deck space are amortized over more planes. Big missile batteries end up on their own platforms with their own superstructure optimized for radar and so on for very good reasons because the USN can afford the tonnage to make their carriers part of a task force. Lastly, VLS cells are a non-trivial cut in the flight deck, which is part of the strength deck and has to have four long cuts in it for catapults, as well as the cuts in the ship girder for the hangar exits onto the elevators. The cuts that already exist are only possible due to classified structural shenanigans of the deep wizardry sort. The Charles de Gaulle has to have a weak spot in her deck because the reactor needs refueling more frequently. As a result, when their new short catapult designs turned out to only work with literally neck-breaking accelerations, they had to cut down to two cats, and the island is way the hell forward, which sucks because that's prime real estate for spotting planes before launch. The Zumwalts are the first missile focused ships to not need the VLS cut to be in prime centerline real estate, and the way they talk about that development indicates that it's bigger than you'd think.

Standard Aircraft Characteristics pages:
 
F4H-1 Phantom SAC 1 February 1963
 
F4H-1 Phantom SAC 30 April 1960
 
F-4B 1 July 1967
 
RF-4B 1 July 1967
 
F-4J August 1973
 
F-4S May 1984

Our priorities are actual facts. Facts don't give a damn about game balance. You are attempting to pick a fight because your pixel tanks aren't good enough and the documentation of facts is inconvenient to you. As it stands, the only thing you provide is an increase to the signal/noise[sic] ratio on a forum that strives to reduce it at every step.
 
Hopefully you take the gracious gift of my time in the spirit it was intended and contribute signal in the future.
 
Thanks!

I have been remiss, and not been through this thread in a while.
 
Turbo-Electric was largely a curiosity. Kind of cool, lets you do some nifty stuff, but reduction gears kept getting lighter in a way that tons of electrical gear didn't. Considering its main home was the USN, and up until the start of WWII they didn't make a design where weight wasn't limited (pre-treaty ships were limited as a proxy for budget), this really limited its adoption.
 
During the treaty period, where everyone's ships were weight limited, yeah nobody was very interested in a bunch of weight in return for some smallish benefits.
 
They would have been perfect for the Bismarcks, but the Germans were idiots had interesting requirements tangential to actual combat capacity (in this case they required the ability to go from full ahead to full astern within one minute for reasons.
 
They actually do show up once more in warships, in an unlikely place: the Buckley class destroyer escort. Much like the glorious Sherman, the Destroyer escorts used a variety of engine technologies in order to avoid various bottlenecks. So the Buckleys have turbo-electric, and the Cannon class were diesel-electric. This is because reduction gearing was a bottleneck. 
 
Second, regarding triple turrets, the US turrets were space efficient, their triple 14"s were pretty close in diameter to the British twin 15" (New Mexico vs. QEs). This was at the cost of a greater use of manpower rather than machinery, which is potentially troublesome. I'd have to see if it was Friedman and look up the actual numbers and points brought up in British commentary. (I should also probably check in at some point whether there were any refits between then and Surigao and whether they actually missed many salvoes, but I remember that being almost entirely a function of the radar carried. I'll see if I have that much effort in me.)

Every single ton of carrier you put into a single hull gives you more capacity than the last one. It takes a lot of tonnage to be able to launch even one plane, let alone launch, maintain and arm one plane. If you compare the air wings of light carriers to supercarriers, the latter have a lot more air wing per ton because things like maintenance, seakeeping, launch facilities and deck space are amortized over more planes. Big missile batteries end up on their own platforms with their own superstructure optimized for radar and so on for very good reasons because the USN can afford the tonnage to make their carriers part of a task force. Lastly, VLS cells are a non-trivial cut in the flight deck, which is part of the strength deck and has to have four long cuts in it for catapults, as well as the cuts in the ship girder for the hangar exits onto the elevators. The cuts that already exist are only possible due to classified structural shenanigans of the deep wizardry sort. The Charles de Gaulle has to have a weak spot in her deck because the reactor needs refueling more frequently. As a result, when their new short catapult designs turned out to only work with literally neck-breaking accelerations, they had to cut down to two cats, and the island is way the hell forward, which sucks because that's prime real estate for spotting planes before launch. The Zumwalts are the first missile focused ships to not need the VLS cut to be in prime centerline real estate, and the way they talk about that development indicates that it's bigger than you'd think.

I have been remiss, and not been through this thread in a while.
 
Turbo-Electric was largely a curiosity. Kind of cool, lets you do some nifty stuff, but reduction gears kept getting lighter in a way that tons of electrical gear didn't. Considering its main home was the USN, and up until the start of WWII they didn't make a design where weight wasn't limited (pre-treaty ships were limited as a proxy for budget), this really limited its adoption.
 
During the treaty period, where everyone's ships were weight limited, yeah nobody was very interested in a bunch of weight in return for some smallish benefits.
 
They would have been perfect for the Bismarcks, but the Germans were idiots had interesting requirements tangential to actual combat capacity (in this case they required the ability to go from full ahead to full astern within one minute for reasons.
 
They actually do show up once more in warships, in an unlikely place: the Buckley class destroyer escort. Much like the glorious Sherman, the Destroyer escorts used a variety of engine technologies in order to avoid various bottlenecks. So the Buckleys have turbo-electric, and the Cannon class were diesel-electric. This is because reduction gearing was a bottleneck. 
 
Second, regarding triple turrets, the US turrets were space efficient, their triple 14"s were pretty close in diameter to the British twin 15" (New Mexico vs. QEs). This was at the cost of a greater use of manpower rather than machinery, which is potentially troublesome. I'd have to see if it was Friedman and look up the actual numbers and points brought up in British commentary. (I should also probably check in at some point whether there were any refits between then and Surigao and whether they actually missed many salvoes, but I remember that being almost entirely a function of the radar carried. I'll see if I have that much effort in me.)

I have been remiss, and not been through this thread in a while.
 
Turbo-Electric was largely a curiosity. Kind of cool, lets you do some nifty stuff, but reduction gears kept getting lighter in a way that tons of electrical gear didn't. Considering its main home was the USN, and up until the start of WWII they didn't make a design where weight wasn't limited (pre-treaty ships were limited as a proxy for budget), this really limited its adoption.
 
During the treaty period, where everyone's ships were weight limited, yeah nobody was very interested in a bunch of weight in return for some smallish benefits.
 
They would have been perfect for the Bismarcks, but the Germans were idiots had interesting requirements tangential to actual combat capacity (in this case they required the ability to go from full ahead to full astern within one minute for reasons.
 
They actually do show up once more in warships, in an unlikely place: the Buckley class destroyer escort. Much like the glorious Sherman, the Destroyer escorts used a variety of engine technologies in order to avoid various bottlenecks. So the Buckleys have turbo-electric, and the Cannon class were diesel-electric. This is because reduction gearing was a bottleneck. 
 
Second, regarding triple turrets, the US turrets were space efficient, their triple 14"s were pretty close in diameter to the British twin 15" (New Mexico vs. QEs). This was at the cost of a greater use of manpower rather than machinery, which is potentially troublesome. I'd have to see if it was Friedman and look up the actual numbers and points brought up in British commentary. (I should also probably check in at some point whether there were any refits between then and Surigao and whether they actually missed many salvoes, but I remember that being almost entirely a function of the radar carried. I'll see if I have that much effort in me.)

Every single ton of carrier you put into a single hull gives you more capacity than the last one. It takes a lot of tonnage to be able to launch even one plane, let alone launch, maintain and arm one plane. If you compare the air wings of light carriers to supercarriers, the latter have a lot more air wing per ton because things like maintenance, seakeeping, launch facilities and deck space are amortized over more planes. Big missile batteries end up on their own platforms with their own superstructure optimized for radar and so on for very good reasons because the USN can afford the tonnage to make their carriers part of a task force. Lastly, VLS cells are a non-trivial cut in the flight deck, which is part of the strength deck and has to have four long cuts in it for catapults, as well as the cuts in the ship girder for the hangar exits onto the elevators. The cuts that already exist are only possible due to classified structural shenanigans of the deep wizardry sort. The Charles de Gaulle has to have a weak spot in her deck because the reactor needs refueling more frequently. As a result, when their new short catapult designs turned out to only work with literally neck-breaking accelerations, they had to cut down to two cats, and the island is way the hell forward, which sucks because that's prime real estate for spotting planes before launch. The Zumwalts are the first missile focused ships to not need the VLS cut to be in prime centerline real estate, and the way they talk about that development indicates that it's bigger than you'd think.

Every single ton of carrier you put into a single hull gives you more capacity than the last one. It takes a lot of tonnage to be able to launch even one plane, let alone launch, maintain and arm one plane. If you compare the air wings of light carriers to supercarriers, the latter have a lot more air wing per ton because things like maintenance, seakeeping, launch facilities and deck space are amortized over more planes. Big missile batteries end up on their own platforms with their own superstructure optimized for radar and so on for very good reasons because the USN can afford the tonnage to make their carriers part of a task force. Lastly, VLS cells are a non-trivial cut in the flight deck, which is part of the strength deck and has to have four long cuts in it for catapults, as well as the cuts in the ship girder for the hangar exits onto the elevators. The cuts that already exist are only possible due to classified structural shenanigans of the deep wizardry sort. The Charles de Gaulle has to have a weak spot in her deck because the reactor needs refueling more frequently. As a result, when their new short catapult designs turned out to only work with literally neck-breaking accelerations, they had to cut down to two cats, and the island is way the hell forward, which sucks because that's prime real estate for spotting planes before launch. The Zumwalts are the first missile focused ships to not need the VLS cut to be in prime centerline real estate, and the way they talk about that development indicates that it's bigger than you'd think.

Ships haven't been tonnage critical since a little bit after WWII, instead they're volume critical. That's why a modern warship is an apartment building full of computers and coated in radars on top of a hull full of missile and engine. (Also this is a major factor in armor being obsoleted). Discounting the VLS and AEGIS is also probably a mistake. It allows very rapid engagement by a single coordinated system rather than Soviet/Russian style multiple systems, and packs a huge wad of missiles ready to go rather than having to wait for them to be readied from the magazines. You also get things like the Standard Missile being useful in offensive and defensive roles by dint of being a good long range anti-air missile with a lot of energy.
 
Also the USN is more worried than any other navy afloat about things like being able to spend as much time as possible at sea. Steaming to and from their destination is time spent with sailors and ships being used but producing none of the value that's their reason for existing. So seakeeping is a huge priority for the USN, and they tend to take it very seriously.
 
Given the proud tradition of secondary navies tending to use a greater fraction of displacement for armament and sitting in port until needed, the USN is doing pretty well.
 
 
Entirely agreed, but don't neglect to multiply those putative 'sorties' that lesser carriers manage by some fractional factor to represent how a ski jump leaves you choosing between a reasonable range or an actual weapons load (and if you take the latter by the former, multiply out by a factor to represent the fantastic odds of your carrier being close enough to be found and killed by real opponents).
 
 
It's probably worth considering that the battleship was obsoleted by the Essex class. Why, you might ask, is an evolutionary design what put the battleship out of business rather than some revolutionary new system that ? 24 hulls. By the end of that class, naval power was capable of tangling with land based air power if it was concentrated and well run. Coordinating with land based air was and is a huge help, but without that, the critical mass to just hunt and utterly destroy a battleship wasn't necessarily there and things like a guerre de course with battleships going into important areas at night (There's a reason Guadalcanal was a nightclub par excellence for surface fleets) were honestly totally viable.
 
The thing is that by 1945, the war wasn't about weaksauce raids into and out of enemy air cover, and careful island hopping, it was about "fuck you, we're the USN, and we're going to deploy the first proper integrated air defense setup on the high seas and dare you to come at us enough to make it count, which means mass attacks by guided munitions (human or otherwise)" And after the war, either you're deploying with or against that massed naval air power, or you don't matter (Sorry Argies but you got taken down by the British. The British. That's a geopolitical corgi-mauling considering what passes for a carrier over there).

I've got a cav arms lower full of KE arms goodies that's rock solid. I used a Faxon pencil barrel and carbon fiber handguard and an Aero upper with no FA, but if I were doing it again, I'd be tempted by Sionics' upper sans handguard and the Faxon carbon fiber, since that means the upper QA process is more than me with a dumb look on my face. If I were trying to go cheaper, I've got a very favorable impression of ALG handguards as a budget sensitive solution.

I get called one a bunch on imgur for getting pissed off with the continual anti-feminist circlejerk, does that count? Frankly though it's an awful term because it really doesn't specify any defining characteristic that actually properly distinguishes the people who outright suck and are too busy playing privlege power politics or people actually just trying to tone down the hate. So it's all too easy for people to throw that title around and dismiss your opinions because you don't match the in-group's accepted opinions.
 
Unlike hippies, which by definition are neo-luddite morons who'd rather empathize with animals than the poor because then they might be expected to actually do something to help humans.

Regarding the US adopting triple turrets much later than some other nations:
 
The US' first ships that could have really benefitted from triples are the Delaware class, and it appears that for them (and the Floridas when the 14" wasn't ready in time) that weight at the aft end of the ship was very limited, to the point they accepted only one turret able to fire straight backwards to avoid even the extra weight that making the number 4 turret superfiring would have added. Unfortunately I don't know what was up with the Wyomings. The New Yorks ended up like that just because they were designed before the triple was really finished, the Delawares are the real mystery and I don't know why.

The US went with triples because they'd seen just how clumsy the five and six turret layouts that resulted otherwise were. They were still concerned about excessive weight aft it seems, the first draft of what became the Nevada was based on the New York with the number 4 turret eliminated and number 3 raised before all turrets were turned into triples rather than eliminating number 3. It's also worth a quick note that all this is with 14" guns rather than the 12s on previous triples, which makes the weight on the ends a much bigger problem. Only after Delaware's magazine cooling was reported a failure did they push the turrets all the way out on the ends. The triple was actually adopted after the New York class as a weight and length saving measure. The USN was actually very tightly limited in ship cost by its political setup, with a lot of repeat ship classes out of a desire to not raise costs. That translated into a direct limit on armor and machinery weight.

The US had previously considered triples (and they'd had de facto quads with the Virginias) all the way back in 1905 (I don't want to know what "semisuperposed" means incidentally) for the South Carolina. The biggest problem for them seems to have been getting the turret working the way they ran things, since each gun was elevated by a single pointer per and they weren't sure where the middle gun's pointer would go. The solution was a single pointer per turret with the guns elevating as a unit, but that left concerns about a single blow knocking out the entire turret and the alignment of the guns in the unit. They also used a very strong front plate to make up for three holes, and tried to get a turret prototyped (it took until two classes with it had been contracted though). Incidentally this is where the US got a lot of their information on gun interference. They hedged their bets by considering twin 15 inch turrets.

Later on BuOrd wanted to avoid working on twin and triple turrets at once when going to 16 inch turrets, preferring a New York style layout (BuEng wanted to keep the machinery the same and go with four turrets). General Board went with five doubles based on fleet experience with doubles and inexperience with triples, as well as theorycrafting that another double would be pretty cheap weight-wise and turboelectric machinery would allow a layout that wouldn't heat the middle turret's magazine. Josephus Daniels said fuck this noise we're building a repeat of last class, pick the caliber you want and that became the Colorado.

I'll point out that the Dante Aligheri and Gangut classes both had two midsection turrets, while the US seemed to have sought to minimize the amount of turrets there. The Tegetthoff class was the familiar ABXY layout, but I don't know if they had any issues with the layout. Frankly I don't take inclusion on that class to be an automatic sign that something doesn't have significant problems, and I'm sure you'd agree there.

Regarding the US adopting triple turrets much later than some other nations:
 
The US' first ships that could have really benefitted from triples are the Delaware class, and it appears that for them (and the Floridas when the 14" wasn't ready in time) that weight at the aft end of the ship was very limited, to the point they accepted only one turret able to fire straight backwards to avoid even the extra weight that making the number 4 turret superfiring would have added. Unfortunately I don't know what was up with the Wyomings. The New Yorks ended up like that just because they were designed before the triple was really finished, the Delawares are the real mystery and I don't know why.

The US went with triples because they'd seen just how clumsy the five and six turret layouts that resulted otherwise were. They were still concerned about excessive weight aft it seems, the first draft of what became the Nevada was based on the New York with the number 4 turret eliminated and number 3 raised before all turrets were turned into triples rather than eliminating number 3. It's also worth a quick note that all this is with 14" guns rather than the 12s on previous triples, which makes the weight on the ends a much bigger problem. Only after Delaware's magazine cooling was reported a failure did they push the turrets all the way out on the ends. The triple was actually adopted after the New York class as a weight and length saving measure. The USN was actually very tightly limited in ship cost by its political setup, with a lot of repeat ship classes out of a desire to not raise costs. That translated into a direct limit on armor and machinery weight.

The US had previously considered triples (and they'd had de facto quads with the Virginias) all the way back in 1905 (I don't want to know what "semisuperposed" means incidentally) for the South Carolina. The biggest problem for them seems to have been getting the turret working the way they ran things, since each gun was elevated by a single pointer per and they weren't sure where the middle gun's pointer would go. The solution was a single pointer per turret with the guns elevating as a unit, but that left concerns about a single blow knocking out the entire turret and the alignment of the guns in the unit. They also used a very strong front plate to make up for three holes, and tried to get a turret prototyped (it took until two classes with it had been contracted though). Incidentally this is where the US got a lot of their information on gun interference. They hedged their bets by considering twin 15 inch turrets.

Later on BuOrd wanted to avoid working on twin and triple turrets at once when going to 16 inch turrets, preferring a New York style layout (BuEng wanted to keep the machinery the same and go with four turrets). General Board went with five doubles based on fleet experience with doubles and inexperience with triples, as well as theorycrafting that another double would be pretty cheap weight-wise and turboelectric machinery would allow a layout that wouldn't heat the middle turret's magazine. Josephus Daniels said fuck this noise we're building a repeat of last class, pick the caliber you want and that became the Colorado.

I'll point out that the Dante Aligheri and Gangut classes both had two midsection turrets, while the US seemed to have sought to minimize the amount of turrets there. The Tegetthoff class was the familiar ABXY layout, but I don't know if they had any issues with the layout. Frankly I don't take inclusion on that class to be an automatic sign that something doesn't have significant problems, and I'm sure you'd agree there.

Fire control got good enough that they didn't overlap with battleship engagement ranges any more. When I mentioned that in 1903, they were talking about torpedoes being decisive at 3,000 yards, those were ranges that gunnery was being exchanged at as well. Later on, torpedoes weren't able to keep up with the rapid realization of big guns' potential driven by fire control systems. Plus, you'd have to slow down, which kept becoming more of an imposition as speeds grew. Range was the main driver though, in 1911, the torpedo could reach 6,000 yards, but gun range had quadrupled to 12,000 yards. The 1913 specification for Battleship 1915 that was enthusiastic about torpedoes was shortly following a 10,000 yard torpedo.
 
Torps are more expensive in terms of room than in terms of weight, although in some designs they may cost room in such a way that you need to spend weight on ship structure to offset that. The other big problem is that they take room that you can't put a torpedo defense system in and that you can't carry structural bulkheads through. Worse, through WWI and the destructive testing that followed the treaty, they started to realize just what happened when a shell fell short and what happened when such a room was hit (that was more WWI experience). Suddenly people weren't feeling so smug about those unprotected rooms full of torpedo. The main reason they lasted as long as the final pre-treaty designs was likely inertia driven partly by just how long it took to design ships (see also that 1913 spec for Battleship 1915). There's still some wiggle room in the timeframe I should go over WWI history again to cover.
 
Edit for clarification: By wiggle room, I'm surprised the Nelsons got built with torpedoes. I can easily see the Colorado class being in the pipes, the Nagato class wasn't from a nation that would've had much first hand experience with underwater damage, but the British surprise me. At a guess, the Nelsons were quite long ships (reducing drag by lengthening the hull was a lighter way to gain speed than adding more machinery and its protection), so the room wasn't a big deal.

Fire control got good enough that they didn't overlap with battleship engagement ranges any more. When I mentioned that in 1903, they were talking about torpedoes being decisive at 3,000 yards, those were ranges that gunnery was being exchanged at as well. Later on, torpedoes weren't able to keep up with the rapid realization of big guns' potential driven by fire control systems. Plus, you'd have to slow down, which kept becoming more of an imposition as speeds grew. Range was the main driver though, in 1911, the torpedo could reach 6,000 yards, but gun range had quadrupled to 12,000 yards. The 1913 specification for Battleship 1915 that was enthusiastic about torpedoes was shortly following a 10,000 yard torpedo.
 
Torps are more expensive in terms of room than in terms of weight, although in some designs they may cost room in such a way that you need to spend weight on ship structure to offset that. The other big problem is that they take room that you can't put a torpedo defense system in and that you can't carry structural bulkheads through. Worse, through WWI and the destructive testing that followed the treaty, they started to realize just what happened when a shell fell short and what happened when such a room was hit (that was more WWI experience). Suddenly people weren't feeling so smug about those unprotected rooms full of torpedo. The main reason they lasted as long as the final pre-treaty designs was likely inertia driven partly by just how long it took to design ships (see also that 1913 spec for Battleship 1915). There's still some wiggle room in the timeframe I should go over WWI history again to cover.
 
Edit for clarification: By wiggle room, I'm surprised the Nelsons got built with torpedoes. I can easily see the Colorado class being in the pipes, the Nagato class wasn't from a nation that would've had much first hand experience with underwater damage, but the British surprise me. At a guess, the Nelsons were quite long ships (reducing drag by lengthening the hull was a lighter way to gain speed than adding more machinery and its protection), so the room wasn't a big deal.

Honestly I'd be surprised to see anybody without torp tubes on their battleships through most of the dreadnought era through till the treaty. The biggest divergence I can think of is the US not putting forward or aft tubes on even early on, which goes with their general disdain for concerns about end-on fire.
 
They seem to have been universal up until the treaty. Japan had some really heavy layouts, with the Nagato class carrying eight a side (two of four per side were above water, which is interesting).
 
Germany, UK, Japan, France, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Argentina, Chile, the only navy I can think of to have battleships without any tubes are the Brazilians (I definitely had to look that one up).

NavWeaps is a really good site and has the best info on the subject I've seen:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-029.htm
 
For more:
 
http://navweaps.com/index_tech/index_tech.php#Ship_Design_and_Construction
 
I recommend the one on prismatic coefficient at the very least, it's about hull form.
 
Anyway, I was swinging by to post this.
 
Fun topics in ship design: The Superposed Turret

I'm not saying it's the cake for the wedding between the US and Mahan's ideas, but it's a pretty likely explanation.
The first US battleship was the Texas, authorized in 1886, and already obsolete when completed in 1895. The US built up to the second strongest naval power in terms of battle line strength in the twenty years after 1886. They did this in two major bursts between 1890 and 1896 and 1900 and 1902. These bursts followed each other so quickly that they couldn't incorporate experience with actually using the things. The only war experience they got was the Spanish-American war of 1898, which was in time for the latter group of ships. The result was a bunch of ships that got some things right, some things wrong, and some things so different that without them going to war we still don't know if they were actually a good idea or not. One which was definitely not in the first category was the superposed turret. In classic old timey racism manner with a dash of timeless hyperbole, William S. Sims claimed that (at least as far as the Kearsarges went), the setup was "The greatest crime ever perpetrated against the white race".
So what exactly are superposed turrets?
They're what happens when a daddy ship designer loves a mommy place to put a turret a bit too much. It's also what happens when a nation is backwards technologically and trying to match more sophisticated weapons with innovation. Describing what a design feature is is only part of what matters, the trade-off it means are vital to a ship as a whole, and the US had a problem with a different toolkit to solve it than other nations. The US had a problem in being unable to make proper 5-inch rapid fire guns (IE firing a shell from a metal cartridge that seals the breech), while foreign ships were armed with 6 inch guns of the type. The solution decided upon was to mount a slower firing secondary that could defeat protection against the 6 inch rapid fire guns. That meant an 8 inch gun, with the serious problems that meant. The guns were heavy and cumbersome, the 6 inch guns could devote much more of a similar amount of weight to ammunition, and blast interference would be severe, particularly on the relatively short and light US ships. The first class of US battleship with such guns, the Indiana was a mess. It took four twin turrets to get four 8 inch guns on a side, and the small ships were incredibly crowded with guns, which made for serious issues with blast interference.

Just look at this. I'm pretty sure some of those firing arcs would be grounds for an evacuation or failing that a court martial.
The ships were simultaneously badly cramped and undermanned (only nine line officers, with none for the torpedoes, main deck battery, secondary battery or replacements for those killed in action(!)), could only use 400 tons of coal if they wanted to have their design freeboard (or to have their belt line up with the waterline, at maximum draft the belt would be submerged). Naturally foreign observers were very impressed, since the US had clearly solved the problem of fitting a very heavy weight of ordnance into a very compact hull, and they neatly missed the statements made in Navy Department publications that they couldn't make an RF 6 inch. The next design down the line (Iowa) was a very similar design that traded in 13 inch main guns for very effective 12s and 6 inch BLR (breech loading rifled) for 4 inch RF in order to get a longer hull with a long forecastle and a greater coal load at normal displacement. This step from "coastline battleship" to "seagoing coastline battleship" was a major improvement. There were still problems though, that the following Kearsarge class sought to improve.
The high 8 inch turrets were troublesome, especially since BuOrd had finally figured out a 5-inch RF gun, and designs showed a long casemate for them, which pushed the 8 inch turrets out torward the ends. The turrets didn't have protection for their support structures all the way up, with only light armor (4" vs and 18" belt) covering half the way up to the turret itself, leaving the potential problem of being undermined by rapid firing guns.
The superposed turret was a replacement for all these problems. The 8 inch turret would be placed on top of the main caliber turret. The unprotected barbette and structure would be replaced by a thickly armored main caliber turret, the 8 inch turrets would be moved over away from the RF battery, and better yet, put them on the centerline so broadside firepower could be maintained with half the turrets. The ideas considered before this design were:
-two centerline turrets and two more on the waist
-two turrets on the beam forward and one superfiring aft
-two superfiring turrets on the centerline
-two turrets in the waist
BuOrd didn't like any of the designs, and an ensign who would later become its chief (Joseph Strauss) came up with the idea of a double-story turret. The immediate objection that the 8 inch guns and 12 inch guns might not want to shoot the same thing was "solved" by even a large ship being a pretty small target at battle range, while at shorter range, the 8 inch guns could take advantage of their 2 to 3 times faster reload to train back and forth. The turret would take "only" 30 seconds (at a point where the main battery fired once in five minutes and the 8 inch once in two) to train from one side to another so in theory fire could be maintained against a weaker target to one side while the main battery engaged a heavier target. Justifications aside, the blast interference situation was markedly improved, and that was a serious improvement over a lot of contemporaries. For example, the French Brennus' crew had worked out a system of bugle calls by which crews could leave their guns to get shelter from the blast of the heavy guns.
The two ships of the Kearsarge class weren't commissioned before 1900, so two more classes were laid down before any operational experience could be gained, but gunnery trials were successful, even though the 8 and 13 inch guns carried by the design were obsolete at that point. Amusingly the merits of the superposed design weren't the most notable features of the gunnery design of the ships. The 13 inch mount was flawed in a way that made the main battery guns be mounted too far back in the turret, which made for huge ports for the guns and potentially enemy fire (this failure, and a possibly contrived scenario by which a lit match (rather than a more likely ember) could be thrown straight through that gap into the magazine was the foundation of Sims' criticism of the design). The 5 inch battery wasn't subdivided by splinter bulkheads, which raised the possibility of a single hitting wiping out the entire battery of 7 guns on the side. Foreign observers didn't seem to hate the design, but nobody copied it, and it was considered to be a typical American overgunning of a ship.
The superposed turret was sidelined after the Kearsarge class, with the advent of a new rapid firing 6 inch gun. Since the 6 inch drastically outpaced the 8 inch in rate of fire and the 8 inch could penetrate enemy secondary protection but only with AP ammunition without HE, the 8 inch gun was rendered dubious in terms of value.
The Spanish-American war rolled around when the Texas, Indiana, and Iowa were the only battleship classes in service, and the 8 inch received favorable reviews for its decent rate of fire, flat trajectory, and actually scoring hits (13 of 319) at Santiago (unlike the 13s). Somehow nobody seems to have noticed that the weapons present for the battle were a generation old, and the rapid fire 6 inch (or even 5 inch) gun wasn't even present. The Virginia class was designed in a period where the 8 inch had a renewed cachet, and they were given two double turrets like the Kearsarge and two more 8 inch turrets in the waist for a broadside of four 12 inch and six 8 inch at the behest of seagoing officers in the Board on Construction (a design similar to the Indiana was favored until the objections of one of the officers meant a second board, which the chief of BuOrd still wasn't included in). It actually took two years to figure out what they wanted to build, and there were later claims that some of the votes in favor of the design built were to spoil a BuOrd proposal for replacing the wing 8" turrets with four additional 6-inch guns.
Unfortunately, while the Virginia class fixed the mounting, they weren't able to fix the passage of time. Heavy guns fired faster by that point in time, enough so that the concussion and smoke from the 12 inch guns alternating fire every 20 seconds, the 8 inch would only have 10 seconds to fire, and would likely interrupt the next 12 inch salvo. A variety of salvo techniques were tried, single barreled, double barreled, double barreled 8 inch combined with single 12 inch, and so on. Nothing really worked for that problem.
On the plus side, they had plenty of experience shooting guns over other turrets. That turned out to be nice to have as they entered the all big gun era. The South Carolina class was able to fit an equal broadside to the Dreadnought under better armor on about 3,000 tons less displacement (it's worth noting the US gave a damn about displacement and the UK didn't).