The reasons HMS Queen Elizabeth has two ‘islands’
savetheroyalnavy.org
savetheroyalnavy.org
> The Commander Air, “Wings” gets a day cabin in the aft island but does not have his own lift, like the Captain up forward.
I know there's a perfectly good practical reason for the Commander Air not having a lift, but i do love the idea that we British are still playing silly little status games even at sea!
In all seriousness, symbols of status are important in the military, and not just to stroke the top guy's ego. They reinforce the notion of hierarchy, which is something without which you lose battles you might have won.
Besides, if there's any people who know how to prepare for and execute surface warfare, it's you British. Clearly you've done something right over the years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_s...
Secondly, I would argue that the reason the seas have been free from "major conflict" over the last 60 years is in no small measure due to the preponderance of naval power wielded by the United States and Russia. If odds had not been overwhelming, do you think there would have been less conflict, or more?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
https://www.quora.com/How-many-aircraft-carriers-did-the-USA...
The scale of WW2 manufacturing boggles the mind. The numbers from Russian tank factories are pretty astounding too.
Also lower standards and total war economy will do wonders for speed of production.
Today they keep switching things up so much between each iteration.
But for the few that broke in half, several more were sunk by U-Boots. They weren't expected to last many more years after the war (life span of only 5 years) and it didn't matter that much given the short term necessity of the war.
And they weren't really designed for battle - they were designed to protect convoys from submarines (at least the US version). They weren't as fast as fleet carriers, had smaller air wings, little armor, less range, almost no anti-aircraft capability, and not much in the way of damage control. As a pilot you really wouldn't want to be on an escort carrier.
Though it could be worse - you could be on a CAM ship:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAM_ship
In the Battle of Leyte Gulf a handful of escort carriers were responsible for sinking a fair number of Japanese capital ships, so they weren't useless in fleet actions.
They're much smaller and less sophisticated than the fleet carriers, but the US built a metric shitton of them during WWII and they were essential in projecting air power.
Combustible Vulnerable and Expendable (CVE).
Overwhelming American naval power is a cause of this peace, not an irrelevant/wasteful overbuild. It's peace through superior firepower, Pax Americana.
If anything the aircraft carriers are what the US does to stir up shit around the globe: Korea, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, and Afghanistan among others.
But let's say you have a carrier and nobody else has more than one. Building a second makes you top dog and opens up a range of strategic options.
+10 assault carrier ships with vtol aircrafts on them (harriers, F-35).
One of the problems is we're the guarantor of Japan's security, and we can't do that without at least three carrier battle groups (one on station, one under refit, one in transit). If we stop, Japan will feel compelled to build its own carriers (and not just "helicopter carrying destroyers"), which could kick off a regional naval arms race.
That's the theory, anyway. The Chinese are already building a first-class navy as quickly as they can, so the neighbors are starting to consider their options. And then there's the Norks...
Seems to me that canals make rather sitting targets for warships, at war time at least.
Yes. A carrier group is able to project military power for a great distance around itself. Long range missiles, submarines, aircraft, you name it. Presumably it would monitor the canal along its entire length, and destroy anything that approaches by land or sea before it is able to create or become an obstacle.
Here's an interesting lesson from WW2 which shows the danger of previously unknown coastal torpedo batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Drøbak_Sound
See the Yellow Fleet, trapped in the Suez Canal for 8 years.
[0] Speeded-up video of the transit: https://sploid.gizmodo.com/cool-video-of-a-us-aircraft-carri...
with regards to this new carrier it probably was a good idea to not go nuclear when your experience with it at this scale is not sufficient plus just the inherent costs of doing that.
one would think the age of CVs has passed similar to how the age of BBs passed even prior to WW2 but naval commands are very loathe to acknowledge a shift in tactics until half their fleet is sunk
My guess is that this is because of the fires which took Sheffield out of combat, the initial damage from the Exocet warhead was substantial, but what killed Sheffield and Coventry was the fire afterwards. The investigations afterwards showed that a split superstructure would have allowed continued operation including withdrawal from the combat space and low allocation of rescue resources.
I think/guess that this would have been critical should aggressor forces been slightly more substantial; it would have been very easy to get into a situation where the capability to manage the rescue and recovery of struck ships would have been lost, and this would have led to a substantial escalation in casualties and probable collapse of the fighting capability of the formation - hence to a strategic opportunity for aggressor forces.
http://www.savetheroyalnavy.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/H...
But HMS Queen Elizabeth is a ship and the islands are the two towering structures on it.
Headlines are inherently not exhaustive in their explanation, that's kind of the point.
FTFY
If "HMS" is ambiguous, than [surely "carrier" is too](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier).
HMS is ambiguous until you add carrier, which gives it just a hint of context.
As a Brit, we generally understand that USS George H.W. Bush is a big ship, not a person. This seems to be the same case from the other side of the Atlantic.