Or, in short: Merry Christmas to the bucket!
Also, many thanks to Hood, who kindly allowed me to rework this ship.
IJN Taiho as she looked when commissioned in March 1944:
By far the most beautiful Carrier the Japanese have built, the first to feature an armored flight deck and the only one built wth an enclosed "hurricane bow".
Some other distinctive features were the large island structure, with the funnel angled to starboard, outside the beam, to keep th smoke away from the flight deck. The flight deck itself was offset to port by over 2 meters in order to compensate the weight of the island.
Three 110cm searchlights were located on the flight deck (plus a fourth on a sponson abreast the island), and could be lowered and coverd in order to free space for aircraft operations, an aircraft handling crane was also fitted on the fligh deck port side, towards the stern, it was foldable too.
anti-aircraft armament was composed of six 3.9-inch twin gun mounts and seventeen triple 25mm machine gun mounts, for a total of 51 barrels.
Airwing at completion was:
-22 Mitsubishi A6M
-22 Yokosuka D4Y
-3 Aichi D3A
-18 Nakajima B6N
Afternote:
Some sources claims that Taiho was the only Japanese Carrier to not feature a wooden flight deck, but that it was instead a sort of latex/rubber material. Yet, it seems thet the flight deck was indeed made of wood (something corroborated by a picture ad a couple of survivors accounts.), but it was repainted in May while she was in Tawi Tawi, with a dark paint, apparently ending up resebling some sort of latex covering, hence the possible confusion about it. (I had found around that the paint used might have been even destined for submarine coating but it was used on Taiho because of wartime shortages.)
IJN Taiho as she looked on june 19th 1944 during Operation A-Go, better known as the Battle of the Philippine Sea.
The darwing Depicts her with her nw flight deck coating, enclosed machine gun directors, extra safety nets around the flight deck to protect the machine gun crews from planes in case they failed landing and crashed sideways and finally, flying Vice-Admiral Jisaburo Ozawa flag on the mast.
On that morning At 07:45 while launghing her first strike Taiho was hit by a single torpedo fired by the US sumarine USS albacore, the explosion jammed the forward elevator and ruptured the aviation fuel tanks. Taiho paid hard her only major design flaw, the armored flight deck put her so low in the water that when the bow dipped by 1,5meters because of the torpedo hit flooding the bottom of the elevator pit filled with water and fuel, starting to vapurizing and spreading o the hangar. Yet the decisive event that led to her loss was because of poor damage control, in a wrong effort to disperse the fuel vapurs the damage control team opened all the hatches and ventilation ducts: this eventually only managed to spread the fumes through all the shp, effectively turning the carrier into a floating bomb.
Around 2:30 PM of the same day a massive explosion blew away the sides of the hangars and buckled the flight deck. Taiho immediately lost speed and started to settle upright, ultimately sliding beneath the waves at 4:28 PM, taking a third of her crew with her a mere three months after being commisisoned.
