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It is created from propeller torque.

Note: I have a second image which is near completion of the as-designed carrier. I hope I will be able to upload that tomorrow, but sleep is important too. Here is the in-service version and the text.

HrMs Van Speijk, Aircraft carrier 1938
In 1936, as a few nations step out of the second London naval treaty, The Netherlands lost the sense of security the treaties had given them. The world’s navies would happen to be far less balanced then expected, meaning that the Dutch East Indies would, in case of a conflict, be far too vulnerable without allied navies taking care of the ships the Dutch couldn’t.

So, still in 1936, the decision was made that new ships had to be build. Ships fast, long ranged and powerful enough that they could stand up to anything but capital ships. Multiple nations were at that point working on new ships not dissimilar to what the Dutch had in mind, most notably The German Scharnhorsts and the French Dunkerques. Delegations were send to both countries to explore the possibilities of working together. Both nations agreed, but the French design was the most fitting to the Dutch requirements.
That said, the design needed some changes to match all Dutch requirements. The hull was lengthened to 220 meters, the beam slightly reduced to 31 meters and the draft reduced to 7.5 meters. This resulted in an displacement of 25000 tons. The armament would be 9 28cm guns in 3 triple turrets. All turrets would be mounted forwards of the superstructure. 4 twin 12cm guns would be situated around the superstructure, and on top of the superstructure would be 2 sets of 3 twin 40mm mountings, centrally guided. The armour would be relatively light, but the torpedo protection would be similar to that of the Dunkerque battleship.

3 of these ships would be build, estimated commissioning would be in 1941. All 3 were laid down in 1938, however a few months after discussion arose in the Dutch parliament. What if these expensive ships ARE countered by an capital ship? At first, there is talk about increasing the armour of the battlecruisers, but that would reduce speed or increase size to unacceptable levels. The representative of the navy points out that the realistic way to decrease the chance of the battlecruisers running into capital ships and increase the firepower against such an opponent, the best answer would be long ranged recon planes and torpedo planes. The navy has a selection of both, but not a lot of them.
After long discussions, one of the battlecruisers is to be completed as an aircraft carrier which serves as the centrepiece of the naval aviation wherever the power of the fleet is required. Because of that the fleet has more firepower, is more likely to be in the right place, and interfaces nicely with the rest of the military in the Dutch East Indies.



However, the thread arrived faster then the new ships were ready. May 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands, and only the carrier was afloat. The 2 battlecruisers were still in their building docks, waiting for long lead items like the guns. The carrier was floated a few months earlier, when the hull was completed; superstructure, weapons and fitting out would be done at the quay.

During the German invasion, the ship was towed to Britain, to be completed there. She was operational early in 1941. Her streamlined Dutch superstructure was replaced by a simple, blocky superstructure, and the 120mm guns which were left at the quay in The Netherlands were replaced by 5 twin 4in guns matching those of the cruiser Van Heemskerck, which was being converted at the same time. The 2 centrally guided fire control for the 40mm were not fitted, instead the 4 radar guided Bofors #4 mountings were spread over the 4 gun emplacements, guiding the locally controlled #3 mountings.

However great the need for aircraft carriers, there was an issue though. The Dutch had no experience in building and operating aircraft carriers, let alone that it fully matched British standards. The ship was literally too foreign to operate together with most of the Royal Navy. After a few trips to the US (as escort, with a few British crewed Swordfishes on board, but mostly as aircraft transport ship, bringing US aircraft to help with the war effort) the ship received a set of Swordfishes with Dutch crews (still in british markings) and was sent to the east indies in January 1942, together with the light cruiser Jacob van Heemskerck and an escort of 2 British destroyers. They would not arrive in time for the Battle of the Java Sea and be redirected to Australia. Here the ship would be useful as an recon unit during the Japanese advance, but the forces were so overwhelmingly against the allies at this point that no victories were possible. As the US forces started pushing the Japanese back, the ship again ran into the same issues as when she was commissioned: She was too foreign to operate together with the US fleets, and was instead sent as the “aircraft express” between the US and wherever the losses of US aircraft were high, to replenish the supply of both aircraft and pilots. Most of the time, the ship would just launch the aircraft as soon as the US aircraft carriers came into range, keeping the ship far away from the actual battles. The value of her logistical support was of high value though.

From early 1943 onwards, the ship was finally used in actual combat. She was used together with British destroyers as the 6th hunter-killer support group in the Atlantic. The ship was fitted with 24 British crewed TBM Avengers (her swordfishes and Dutch crews moved to MAC ships) which were, at the end of the war, credited with several U-boat kills. She would do this duty faithfully and quite effective for the rest of the war, except for the few months in 1944 that her bow had to be repaired after being damaged by a sea mine near the British coast. The 6 casualties made by that mine were the only deaths by enemy weaponry the ship would suffer during her career. After a few months a Dutch TBM airwing was trained and stationed on board.

After the war, the ship was again fitted with a fully Dutch airwing of Avengers and Firefly’s. She would be replaced by a more modern, British build Colossus class with more upgrade potential, after the latter was refitted with new radars and an angled deck in 1959. The Van Speijk was laid up in reserve until 1975. The flood of cheap American and british carriers on the market meant that nobody wanted a second-hand carrier that was one of a kind, and the ship was demolished in 1976.


The aircraft carrier is named Van Speijk, something thought up by a staff officer with a humor that not everyone at the time might have liked. Van Speijk was famous for the words “dan liever de lucht in”, meaning “I’d rather blow up then get captured” but it can be translated literally as “I’d rather go up into the air”. True to these words, the Van Speijk send up unnumerable aircraft into the air during her career, and the ship would be fondly remembered by any who came across her over the years.

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Drawings are credited with J.Scholtens
I ask of you to prove me wrong. Not say I am wrong, but prove it, because then I will have learned something new.
Shipbucket Wiki admin

HNLMS Nassau, 1944 Aircraft Carrier

The Nassau class marked the first ground-up aircraft carrier for the Royal Dutch Navy. The decision to create such a massive warship was due to the threat of Japan possibly invading the Dutch East Indies to gain more resources for its ever-expanding empire. The class was planned to be 2 ships, built in the UK, that were to commission in 1944 and 1945, however the German invasion of the Netherlands as part of Case Yellow caused the 2nd one of the class to be cancelled due to lack of resources. Throughout the war she would be repeatedly targeted by German bombers who were trying to delay her construction while in dock, however with only a few near misses she was able to commission into the Free Dutch Navy in July of 1944.



HNLMS Nassau would be sent over to the Pacific ocean to take on Japan as part of Task Force 22 which consisted of: the carriers Nassau, Implacable, Indefatigable, battleships Howe and Nelson, as well as numerous cruisers and other light fleet units. Arriving in Perth near the end of 1944, the carrier group made several strikes in the Japanese occupied island of Java and Sumatra, attacking rubber and oil fields to disrupt supply routes. On March 10th, Task Force 22 was disbanded and merged with the 1st Aircraft Carrier Squadron to assist the American Navy in the Invasion of Iwo Jima, where Nassau and the rest of the Squadron provided aerial reconnaissance and bombardment of fortified positions. While not being able to assist in the destruction of the Yamato, she had been selected to participate in a follow up attack on the Kure naval base in order to finally cripple the Japanese navy. Nassau's aircraft had been tasked with destroying the two heavy cruisers Aoba and Tone in order to cut down the last remaining heavy cruiser units of the Japanese Navy. During the attack, 7 planes were shot down in return for 3 bomb and 2 torpedo hits on Aoba, as well as 5 bomb and 4 torpedo hits on Tone, effectively destroying the last of the Japanese heavy cruiser force. However, a Japanese counterattack on the fleet involved a very near miss for the Nassau, as a 500lbs bomb missed her bow by 30 meters.



Upon the announcement of the Surrender of the Japanese Empire, Nassau would be selected to host the Dutch representative at the official surrender in Tokyo Bay on September 2nd, 1945.

Post war Nassau would help bring troops back from Indonesia, until she was called into action to provide military aid to suppress revolutionaries in Jakarta in 1950. From 1956-1959 she would be put in the dockyard to receive her midlife refit which added an 8° angled flight deck, new elevators, new island, 40 mm anti-aircraft guns, steam catapult, and brand new aviation facilities and electronic equipment. In the mid 1970s after a naval budget cut, she was deemed too expensive to maintain as an fleet unit so Nassau was officially decommissioned and sold sold to the Egyptian navy in 1978 where she would live out the rest of her service as an helicopter assault carrier until 2003 when she was sold for scrap.

General characteristics

Type: Aircraft carrier
Owner: Royal Dutch navy
Name: Nassau
Motto: Unanimi cum ratione (Latin for "united in purpose")
Builder: Vickers-Armstrongs
Laid down : June 15th, 1939
Launched: March 2nd, 1942
Commission: July 13th, 1944
Displacement: 26,850 tons (standard), 31,250 tons (full load)
Length: 800.5 m
Beam: 34 m
Draft: 31.5 m
Propulsion:
6 boilers, driving 4 geared turbines 112,500 shp
Speed: 30.7 knots

Armament:
2×8 QF 4.5-inch Mk III
4×QF 5.25-inch Mk I
1×QF 2 pdr Mark VIII
24×Oerlikon 20 mm cannon

Carried:
74 total
35xKoolhoven F.K.60 (Fighter and attack aircraft)
20xFokker D.XXIII (Dive bomber)
18xGrumman TBF Avenger (Torpedo bomber)
1xSupermarine Sea Otter (Transport)

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Worklist:
- Solkriet - My Personal AU: http://www.shipbucket.com/forums/viewto ... 14&t=10834
- America the Divided - Joint-Project between Minepagen and I http://www.shipbucket.com/forums/viewto ... =14&t=9855
- Occasionally the Random pop-ups of my Abyssinia or Hong Kong AUs

"The word Br*t?sh is a horrible term I never want to hear from you again, We do not tolerate that dehumanization".

Incomplete as it is, here is my attempt .... wanted to get at least this much in ...




The Courageous class is an armoured cruiser conversion. The original hulls were built from upscaled modified Birmingham designs to fulfill criteria for a new armoured cruiser class, with the first of the eight-ship class planned to be joining the Royal Navy in 1918.
With the need for such ships winding down and the demand for more capable ASW ships rising sharply, work on these ships were suspended in the fall of 1916. They would remain in limbo until well after Germany’s surrender at the end of December 1916.
While out of the original 8 ships planned, two ships (HMS Chivalrous and HMS Imperieuse) would be cancelled outright before being laid down. Another, HMS Assiduous, would be broken up on the ways.
While it was assumed that the rest would soon find their ways to the breaker’s, they would find a reprieve as a result of a need for more modern aircraft carriers to first reinforce, and then replace the two old armoured cruiser conversion HMS Black Prince and HMS Warrior, which had served the RN so well in the last 18 months of the Great War.
HMS Furious and HMS Icarus would be the first of the class to begin conversion, and in their original form, even with the innovations and features they carried, they would be more spartan than their following sisters.
HMS Furious would be completed to a single hangar deck plan, as would her sister Icarus. The remaining three ships would be completed to different designs, With Glorious and Courageous having a novel design featuring a flying off deck, accessed directly from the upper shorter hanger, as well as a proper flight deck above the upper hangar. HMS Victorious would complete with two full hangar decks.
The group would be collectively of great interest, as not only would they be among the first aircraft carriers post war, but as well they were seen to be by many as including lessons learned by the RN in the Great War.
By the mid 1920’s the first pair would be joined by their near sisters HMS Courageous, Glorious and Victorious. Shortly after those three joined the fleet, HMS Icarus was sold to Australia at a large discount, and it was announced that it was to be used for both a seaplane tender, as well as a regional support ship to assist in the administration of the new Australian, British and New Zealand territories that had been acquired in the Pacific as a result of the Great War.
Even with it’s changes in designation, HMAS Icarus would still operate normal aircraft, even as it had limited conversions to abstemiously better fulfill its new duties
HMS Furious would join the RN in 1920, and upon commissioning was sent directly to the Mediterranean to support the fleet covering the Turkish War. By 1922, Furious would be assigned to the RNAS training establishment on Bermuda, a deployment she would repeat several times during the late 1920’s and early 30’s.
By mid 1932 HMS Furious was becoming somewhat long in the tooth and would be set out for a comprehensive reconstruction once the first pair of the new Sans Pareil class fleet carriers had joined the fleet. Furious would be with the builders until late 1937, at which time she would rejoin the fleet and return to her old duties with the training establishment on Bermuda.
HMS Furious would be one of the first Royal Navy ships to mount the new combination of 40mm Bofors and 20mm Oerlikon anti-aircraft guns. However, with the ongoing production problems with the new 4.5” dual purpose guns, and further challenges with the heavier 5.25” weapons, her heavy AA weapons would be a quartet of the tried and true twin 4” mounts.
Furious would emerge from the reconstruction as a vastly improved ship, although in the end the cost of her remedials would belay similar work on any more of her sisters other than HMS Victorious.
In 1938, Furious would be dispatched to serve with the Royal Australian Navy while HMAS Icarus spent 18 months in refit and limited reconstruction. Upon that ship’s completion, Furious would join the RN’s Far Eastern fleet at Singapore while HMS Hermes returned to Great Britain for her own rehabilitations. While it had been planned to return HMS Furious to Great Britain for a refit at that point, the then current political reality in the Far East at that point would shelve that option. Instead, HMS Furious would receive a somewhat more moderate refit at Singapore, then remain with the Far Eastern Fleet until the start of the Second Great War in July of 1939.
Furious would play an active part in the Second Great War, seeing action in the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic, home waters, the Mediterranean as well as with the Far Eastern fleet. She would serve well into the mid year of 1944 when she would strike a magnetic mine off Belfast when returning for a refit. Furious would make port, however, the ship was damage to such a degree that there was no point in attempting to repair the damages.
HMS Furious would finish the war docked in moored in Belfast, before being sold to the breakers in the spring of 1946.

After two false starts consisting of a huge armoured carrier left halfway through and a superbattleship conversion that only made it to Springscale (fortunately) here's my entry, without top view, camo, or planes, because there was no way I wasn't submitting something to the challenge I asked for in the first place.



A fast-ish (21kn) ocean liner conversion but also an early experimental ship, she carries a homing beacon, an air search set and a surface search lantern all on folding masts. Her main AA battery is director controlled and assisted by radar, her 39mm guns have stabilized and radar assisted mounts and her AA fit is rounded up by 25mm autocannon. Her compliment is of twelve fighters (which I wasted time on drawing! Check it out here! https://i.imgur.com/O6P9RDN.png ) and eighteen older torpedo bombers refitted with radar for ASW work.

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w o r k l i s t :
Hatsuyuki-class Escort Ships . . . <3

Great drawings!

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MS State Guard - 08 March 2014 - 28 January 2023

The Official IJN Ships & Planes List

#FJB

ok so here is my entry.

Georges Cuvier-Class Croiseur d'aviation

French Navy or Marine National were not a new player in aircraft carrier business. They have operated a single aircraft carrier since late 20s, the Bearn. Which were a conversion of unfinished Normandie-class battleships hull. France however didn't built any carrier again until a large scale naval rearmament project was put forward in the years following the rise of Nazi Germany. Marine Nationale planner envisioned an ambitious projects to built a fleet of newly built carriers consisted of 3 to 4 Joffre-class carrier and a single Croiseur d'aviation which was a concept envision by French planner to combine the firepower of medium sized battleships gun and the rising power of aircraft in form of hybrid carrier. The resulting project named the "PA-5" were finally approved and fund for the construction were approved in 1938 Fiscal Year. The ship was then laid down at Le Havre Naval Shipyard in March 1938.



Georges Cuvier was a lead ships and the only member of her class. Georges Cuvier were born from a series of study of Croiseur d'aviation concept. Which combine the guns on cruiser/ battleships with full sized aircraft carrier. The main purpose of the gun itself was, according to the French planners, were to defend the carrier against surfaced threat and to scare them away. German and Italian cruiser were mostly taken into account. To achieve this, Georges Cuvier was armed with massive 4 330mm/50 Modèle 1931 gun in one quadruple turret. The turret was exactly the same as found in Dunkerque-class Battleships and was mounted near the stern. In addition to strong main armament, Georges Cuvier carried a strong mix of Anti Aircrafts suit, with brand new dual 100mm dual purpose gun in 6 1938 turret mounts. a new quadruple 37mm gun modelle 1938 was also installed in 4 turrets, making a huge improvement over previous AA defence compared to older French ships. To complement that, 12x 25mm AA cannon were also present. All armament were directed by newest French fire control available.

Beside gun armament, as an aircraft carrier, Georges Cuvier were equipped with 25 Breguet 993 attacker and 15 Dewoitine D.710. This strong air wing formed the main punch of Georges Cuvier.

In order to protect the gun and its magazines, Georges Cuvier was protected with 200mm of armour around the 330mm gun. However main belt that protect ships main machinery were only 100mm thick. This was done to preserved weight. It also have an armoured base deck.

Georges Cuvier construction progressed at steady pace, however as war broke in Europe on September 1939, Aircraft carrier construction were taken into highest priority. and Georges Cuvier was able to be launched on March 1940. Around June 1940, situation are absolutely disastrous for France. As Germany advanced deeper into French territory in their blitzkrieg attack and France were on the edge of complete collapse, Georges Cuvier was desperately fitted with engines and with some of her crew and a pair of destroyers, still 60% finished, were able to sneak out of Le Havre as German forces surrounded the town.

However a series of unlucky incidents happened, Georges Cuvier was spotted by German Bombers on her way to Dakar that were looking for her and was attacked by 20 Stuka's and 15 Ju-88s. The skeleton crew werent able to saved her and she was sunk off Spain on 25 June 1940, the day when French surrender.

Georges Cuvier Class

Displacement: 32,500 t
Length : 251 m
Beam : 28 m
Draught : 6 m
Armament : 4x 330mm/50 Modèle 1931 gun in 1 quadruple turrets.
12x 100mm gun in 6 Modèle 1938 turret.
16x 37mm in 4 Modèle 1938 turret.
25x 25mm Hotchkiss Autocannon.
Armour : Main armament belt : 200mm
Main belt : 100mm
Structure : Splinter protection
Superb Anti Torpedo protection.

The submission period for the Second World War Aircraft Carrier Challenge is at an end. The Shipbucket community now has an opportunity to rate the excellent drawings produced over the past two month. The poll can be found at this link. Responses will be accepted until 23:59 UTC-12, 19th of August. A countdown timer can be found here for those wondering how long the poll will remain open.

If you have a suggestion for a future challenge, please visit the suggestions thread. If an idea has already been posted by someone else, don't be afraid to declare your support. Also, the community poll for the Big Iron Challenge is open too. It can be found through this link. Do consider voting in that poll as well.

The poll for the Second World War aircraft carrier challenge is now closed. Drawing an aircraft carrier is no easy feat. I should know, as I had three or four false starts before I decided to give up. To everyone who crossed the finish line, amazing work! This challenge has produced some truly amazing drawings. We had 19 submissions in total (or 20, if you include Cargil48's second entry). That's great for a subject as complex as an aircraft carrier. 28 people responded to the community poll, and I can now reveal the results.



Congratulations to BB1987, who achieved first place with the awesome Tobiuo. It was wonderful to see the hangar arrangements. BB1987's submission also received the highest score in the drawing quality and design realism categories. Second place goes to Garlicdesign and the Italian carrier Sardegna. The camouflage scheme was well executed. Our first entry, Gollevainen's Vladivostok, achieved third place. It certainly set the bar high. Skibud1998 also deserves special mention, as their submission received the highest score in the originality category. Competition was fierce, so don't be to disappointed if you scored lower than you had hoped. For those interested, the First World War battlecruiser challenge is now open.

Some well done and sometimes unique designs. Congratulations to the winners.

Charybdis your Little carrier that could is still my winner and TigerHunter1945... crazy idea, but we're never gonna survive, unless we get a little crazy.

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Nobody expects the Imperial Inquisition!