A Renaissance for Small Aircraft Carriers?

For landing: well, SpaceX can land a rocket vertically on a drone ship after taking it to orbital velocity. You could do similar maneuvers with a drone. Flip the plane so that its wings act like a parachute to slow its descent, and then turn it around all the way to use the propeller to lower it onto the deck, then fold the wings. Without a pilot, the only limits on G-forces is the structural integrity of the airframe, and such planes are likely to land very lightly after completing their mission. Computer control lets you do things that would be totally impractical with a pilot, like maintain stability in a stall.

Takeoff seems the biggest challenge. Ground roll on the Cessna is 960 ft, and the drone will be at its heaviest on take-off. Maybe do an assisted take-off, launching from a gun barrel or compressed air cylinder? Again, without a pilot, you can be much more liberal with G-forces, and with computer control you can do things like unfold the wings in the air. It wouldn't fit in a single container then, but you could have a system of containerized components all working together.

Also, the Russians reportedly have containerized cruise missiles, which meet the requirements for range, payload, and take-off. They don't really have multi-mission capability, but it may not be all that far from there to drones:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch2Rqte6XOs

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/7632...

It's one thing for a drone to carry a few hellfires and be remotely controlled over air space where completely supremacy as been achieved or access granted versus actually having autonomous drones do strikes in hostile air space.

I mean, the later kind of drone exists of course, they're called cruise missiles and they cost 1.6m$ each (Tomahawk Block IV, 2014 price).

The US Arleigh Burke-class can carry missiles to shoot at land, sea and air targets.

CVL = light carrier. These were usually built on cruiser or ocean-liner hulls, with a (WW2) displacement of ~10-14k tons. Some were also purpose-built as small aircraft carriers. I would also include the Cold-War era VSTOL carriers of the British Invincible & Soviet Kiev classes in this category, as well as the jet-conversions of 1950s-era carriers that ended up in many third-world countries. They were built with fleet-carrier speeds of 30+ knots, so they could accompany the fleet on operations, but had air wings of only 20-30 aircraft and often lacked armor protection.

CVE = escort carriers. These were often converted merchant hulls, or purpose-built with a hull similar to merchant ships. They were the same tonnage or slightly smaller than light carriers and were similarly unarmored, but sacrificed speed for simplicity & seakeeping - they were designed to escort merchant convoys or amphibious assaults, which required only about 10kts.

Basically, it's a speed vs. simplicity tradeoff. CVLs were intended to accompany the fleet and participate in offensive operations, while CVEs were intended to accompany merchant or landing ships and operate only defensively. But the tradeoffs involved in making CVLs hit their design goals of speed and aircraft capacity tended to give them poor seakeeping characteristics and made them ineffective in their primary mission, while relaxing those constraints and focusing only on defense led to a platform that was very effective at its more constrained mission, and could also be produced in large-enough numbers that it was surprisingly effective against even superior surface forces.

(This trade-off should be familiar to anyone following the F-35 project.)

Realistically that was never going to happen. We were never going to have steam catapults because a) where would we get the steam with no reactor (and no-one uses conventional steam turbines anymore) and b) steam catapults aren't reliable in arctic waters, which is why previous British and Russian carriers used ski-jumps. And we weren't going to have EMALS either because again, with no nuke where would we get the electrical power?

But the REAL reason is that British Aerospace is involved in the F35 programme and couldn't take the risk that we might shop elsewhere, say Dassault, so they fucked up the design entirely deliberately. Someone should be in jail for that, or at least lose their final-salary pension.

And oddly enough, it's the model that drove most of the program's requirements.

Why civilians in congress thought it was a good idea to have a one-size-fits-all Fighter/Attacker is beyond me, but then to effectively allow Marine requirements to pollute specifications for the two branches of the military that operate the most aircraft is another thing entirely.

As for 'generations behind', this is the whole point and the linchpin of global military stability.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_T._Allison#Thucydides_T...

The Navy's problem is that, in recent decades, most of the US's enemies have been far from a coast. They need range, more range than helicopters can provide, to project power inland. Hence the Osprey and the F-35. But the price of VTOL is very high in many directions - expensive, reduced payload, and fragile.

Without sea-based long-reach air power, and without friendly territory in the neighborhood, it's back to the old way - land Marines, establish a beachhead, build an airfield, and invite the Air Force to come over with their big iron. The US won WWII in the Pacific that way, but it was slow, bloody and expensive.