Shipbucket

Gah, I've been way to busy and the sticky note to comment on this thread fell off. Oops.

She's commissioned in 1965, so she's a contemporary of the Kittyhawks and CVA-01. It's also probably the first class of ships built from the keep up with an angled deck right?

Here is a graphic that should help show get you a feel for different layouts:


Figure 1: Deck Layouts fof CVA-01, CVV, and USS Midway As she appeared after he last refit.

You are looking at an airwing of around 60 planes on a displacement of around 55-60k tons. You're big enough at this point that continuous flight ops (IE simultaneous or near simultaneous launch and recovery is going to be a strong goal. To that end, you've got your cats and wires in the right place. You will also want to have a good traffic flow, and I would put the island between the elevators and use the aft elevator to strike aircraft down below deck and bring them up on the forward elevator.

You'll note the deck space outboard the Island on CVA-01, that is because the Brits used the forward elevator to strike down planes, and then brought them up the aft elevator, and then around on the space outboard of the island (called the 'Alaskan Highway'). This allowed the Brits to make a shorter, wider carrier at the expense of deck park for large strike groups (although that happens with anything in this size it is my understanding that CVA-01 was designed for the continuous ops tempo, not the alpha-strike tempo of the US carriers of the time).

For the engine she's probably running a steam plant (gas turbines were still new and lord knows you don't want to experiment like that on a major fleet asset). How big the stacks are depends on how fast she is supposed to go. You'll note that the stacks on CVV and CVA-01 are much smaller than those on CV-41, partly because they have half of the engine power of the Midways and a bit over a third of the power of one of the larger carriers (Forestals on up). This reduction of engine power means that the ships can't go much above 30 knots while the larger ships can make 33+. Adding additional boilers to the ship between the 100k and 200k shp ranges wouldn't add a lot of speed to the ship, but it might make steaming at nearly full speed and conducting flight ops much easier. Such a decision would come down to fleet doctrine. The exception is CVA-66, which had a smaller stack, but CVA-66 was unique in a lot of ways.

As for the armament, I'd think that by 1960 (when the design is being finalized) the ship is probably down to 4 gun turrets - probably one on each end of each sponson. I'd also see them being removed for generating too much spray by 1975. I do know that the French shipped 8 100mm mounts on Foch and Le Clem in the mid 60s. It's always possible that the BuShips/Admiralty analog gets the design off and the ships are more wet than expected .

Were I doing this, I'd have the 4 twin turrets and place 4 Sea Cat Launchers in such a way that you've got at least one that can fire forward and one that can fire aft (without the guns getting in the way).

As for the radars on the Island, At this era you are going to see:

• A Long Range 2D air Search Set
• A Height-Finder set, possibly replaced with a longer ranged 3D set.
• Air Traffic Control Radars (several different types - in US designations these are the AN/SPN radars)
• Lots of Communications gear for talking to the planes
• At least a pair of fire control units for the guns.

Were I doing this, I'd trunk the funnel up the island and also then angle it outboard as was seen on CVA-67.

I'll try and ponder this some more this evening and get back to you in the morning.

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𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐍𝐄𝐓- 𝑻𝒐 𝑪𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝑺𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆

Yes. The Manticore Class (1950) and Chimera Class (1956) had partial angles, with the Scylla Class being the first with a full angled deck. This is a class of 3 ships, 2 conventional steam power (these) and a half-sister commissioned in 1967 with experimental nuclear power. The Scyllas were the last fleet carriers built with conventional power.
So leave the island basically where it is now, get rid of the deck turret, and make some modifications. I think on mine the aft lift will be the strike-down and the forward the bring-up. I was also thinking of adding a 3rd middeck lift just aft of the cats.

I'd want to go for the larger engines and higher speed as 33 knots is what my cruisers and destroyers of that era were capable of.


The way I have the SeaCats arranged now I believe would fall into that category as the aft port SeaCat is forward of the gun sponson, and the starboard SeaCat is aft of them, with the two forward seacats on either side of the foredeck. You're correct about the guns being gone by the mid 70's, with refits. Don't know what I'll replace them with as yet, but I'll leave that for a bit later and just concentrate on getting the "as built" first.

Haven't quite got to the electronics yet, but those are good suggestions. Thanks. Same with the JFK style funnel. I've always liked the way that particular carrier looked anyhow.

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"Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Seventh Doctor

In all likelihood you wouldn't replace them with anything. By the mid-seventies aircraft will have grown in size and complexity to the point that your engineers and mechanics will be screaming for room to move around, let alone maintain aircraft in.
See the first three units of the Kitty Hawk class and the Tarawa class for examples.

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“Close” only counts with horseshoes, hand grenades, and tactical nuclear weapons.
That which does not kill me has made a grave tactical error

Worklist

Source Materiel is always welcome.

So, I get a call from my Wife while I was at work tonight. She got a new cabinet to put her printer on, and while cleaning all the stuff out of the old one, she found my missing PhotoShop6 disk! Got it installed on my new computor as soon as I got home.

I Love my Wife.

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"Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Seventh Doctor

And again tonight I got another call from my wife while I was at work. Apparently, according to the IT guy where she works, the drive on my dead external HD is still intact, just the powersource or something like that went kerflooie. So, she is taking the casing from her old external drive that failed, but the power thingy still works, and he will perform an drive-ectomy on it, transplanting my drive into her casing. What this means is all the stuff I thought was lost forever after my first HD crash, everything I have done for the past 7 years, all my family pics, all our pics from the Conventions we've been to ... every-bloody-thing ... is quite likely to be recovered!

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"Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Seventh Doctor

Great!

Now Back it up again

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𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐍𝐄𝐓- 𝑻𝒐 𝑪𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝑺𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆

Oh, there will be backing up. I have about 40 CD-ROM's I'm going to put everything on, along with a number of sticks for temp stuff.

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"Anybody remotely interesting is mad in some way." - The Seventh Doctor

My advice is put all your important stuff into the cloud, its not going to get lost up there and they will back their own servers up anyways to tape

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Nick

@ashwellkennedy

And I would advise against this 100%. You don't know what can happen to the stuff you don't have direct control over, with the most recent example being the recent dropbox hack.

The best way to back up your data is to have multiple local copies on various forms of media (flash drive, external hard drive, optical disk pick two minimum) and some form of off-site storage (my preference here is a set of optical disks [both CDs and DVDs] at either a friend's house or with family).

And most importantly - check the fidelity of your backups on a regular basis - CDs don't last like we were promised, and hard drives have moving parts that can fail. The best backup in the world is useless if you can't recover it.

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𝐌𝐀𝐓𝐇𝐍𝐄𝐓- 𝑻𝒐 𝑪𝒐𝒈𝒊𝒕𝒂𝒕𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒕𝒐 𝑺𝒐𝒍𝒗𝒆

And if you pay for your cloud you won't lose anything

I use paid VPS for all my server solutions and I have never had any issues

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Nick

@ashwellkennedy