Talk:Aircraft carrier/Archive 2

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British WW2 carriers

Only the first British WW2 carrier - Furious - was completed before Langley and the Lexingtons. The poor design choices that led to the British favoring of armored-flight-deck carriers over armored-hangar-deck carriers have been documented pretty well, and the fact is that those designs failed in World War II (the never-built Malta class essentially duplicated the far earlier Essex/Ticonderoga class carriers of the US Navy).

Failed in WW2? Did they? I don't think so. Compare the effect of a Japanese kamikaze on a British carrier (bounced off) with the effect on US carriers (burnt out and wrecked). This article is rather factually lacking and, as others have pointed out, somewhat biased. I'll tinker with it. Wiki-Ed 4 July 2005 13:16 (UTC)

The question of the success of the British Armoured carriers is entirely subjective. Certainly, throughout their service during the war they were survivable and resilient platforms that generally performed well. The disadvantages (and perceived failures of the design) were only realised after the war when serious structural fatigue from damage was found to be impossible or prohibitively expensive to repair. The following article at Warships1.com http://www.navweaps.com/index_tech/tech-030.htm is a good, well researched piece on this subject, although I still disagree with the authors assertion that the designs were failures. They were built to fight the war and that is the purpose they served. They were not intentionally built to serve for decades after the war and the fact that many of the USN's carriers did was simply fortuitous for the USN. The vast majority of war built vessels barely lasted into the late fifties anyway due to economies in build quality and shortcuts in design, and the carriers were no exception. Direct comparisons between the two carrier design philosophies can be very misleading.

It's pretty clear that the British armoured-flight-deck carriers were less suitable aviation platforms (which is the purpose of an aircraft carrier) than their American armored-hangar-floor counterparts. They were less stable in rough seas (though the Americans did tend to accept more shippage of water than the Brits; a common theme regardless of ship type), their air wings were smaller, their hangars small and cramped (which limited their ability to operate newer and larger aircraft), flight decks were shorter, fewer and worse AAA emplacements, less avgas bunkerage, smaller weapons magazines, the list of deficiencies compared to their American counterparts pretty much continues in this vein: In every metric that made a good fighting ship and a good aviation ship, the American carriers were superior. Their only real advantage was that they could take a pretty bad flight deck hit (as long as it didn't penetrate the armor deck, which was never a sure thing; if the hit got through the armor deck, both types of ship were equally screwed) and keep fighting, while an American carrier that took flight deck damage had to pull back to Pearl Harbor (or later in the campaign, Ulithi) for repairs. It should be noted that in spite of Ed's claim up above, the same number of American ships as British ships took disabling hits during the last year and a half of the war (about four, Enterprise, Franklin, Bonhomme Richard and Princeton), only one of which (Princeton, which was a light carrier, not a full fleet carrier) sank. Enterprise, Franklin and Richard all returned to port under their own power, hardly "burnt out and wrecked." This should be seen with a caveat, American carriers tended to come under far heavier attack than British ones; their CAP and AA crews were thus worked a LOT harder by the Japanese. Most of the American carriers that suffered kamikaze hits by the Japanese were back in action within hours. Iceberg3k 12:39, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
They were designed to operate in different theatres. You can't compare them with pee-up-the-wall "metrics". If US carriers had been dropped in the Med I don't think larger hangars, longer flight decks, better AAA, bigger bunkers or larger weapons magazines would have helped against land-based bombers, submarines and surface warships, all of which had been responsible for disabling or sinking at least one British carrier by the time the US entered the war in Dec '41. (NB the British Pacific Fleet began operations in November 1944, 9 months before the end of the war, not 18 months.) British designs were spartan because resources were scarce and because they had to survive a hit when the bombers got through, which eventually happened anyway. Wiki-Ed 15:50, 20 August 2006 (UTC)
As I said before, the proof is in the pudding. During the Pacific campaign, during which British and American ships operated together, American carriers took the same number of serious hits as British carriers, despite there being nearly twice as many carriers in the American Fast Carrier Task Force, despite the Japanese putting a far stronger emphasis on knocking the U.S. carriers out (by sending more suicide attackers against them), despite everything that you say should have worked against the American ships. While attackers did get through (and it wasn't bombers that got through; by 1944, the radar-fuzed 5" anti-aircraft VT shells were very thoroughly effective at knocking down bombers before they could strike; it was the small, single-engined suicide planes that occasionally slipped through the AA screens and did the damage), they did so in a much smaller proportion against the American ships, with their heavily layered active defenses, than they did against the armored British carriers. The bomber, in short, did not always get through. Strangely enough, utterly unarmored escort carriers tended to take more hits than either American or British fleet carriers, and tended to not only survive the hits they took, but return to action very quickly. Iceberg3k 17:51, 20 August 2006 (UTC)

1. I realise this is a discussion page, but you'll have to cite your sources. The articles (certainly for British carriers) are not sufficiently detailed (or consistent) so I can't see where you're drawing your facts from. 2. "Bomber" (in the phrase "the bomber will always get through") was a blanket term for an aircraft attacking a land/sea based target. My comment was about British carriers being designed for actions in the early part of the war in the Atlantic/Med. However, clearly the attackers still got through defences later in the war in the Pacific otherwise we wouldn't be having this discussion. 3. As for escort carriers surviving more hits than British/US carriers... I think the article covers this. They had less planes/fuel/ammo than a US fleet carrier so they were less likely to catch fire and/or explode (although some did, eg. USS St. Lo) which must have also applied to the prioritisation of British carriers. 4. I think this topic is possibly deserving of a much longer treatise, and there is much to be said about the relative efficiency of active/passive defence. However, I would maintain that in a high-intensity sea battle an admiral would have to expect to take hits and would have to hope his ships could absorb them when they came. Unfortunately post-war designers decided active defence was more important and the end result is that modern warships have very little passive protection (i.e. armour) and are damaged or sunk when they get hit (eg. the Falklands War). Wiki-Ed 11:01, 21 August 2006 (UTC)

I've made a few edits to the deck armour and location section. Most of the changes are just moving sentences around or breaking them up so they're more easy to read. I've amended the paragraph contending that one design "proved" more effective than another as I don't believe that comparisons are verifiable, only effects. It now emphasises the relative strengths of each design. I have also deleted the section contending that kamikaze attacks were responsible for sending British ships to the breakers after the war. Many of the British carriers that were sent to the Pacific had been damaged several times before the comparable US carriers had even been launched. The combination of bombs and kamikaze strikes over the course of a long war could be put forward as a reason, but if I recall correctly the actual reason they were scrapped was economic. Wiki-Ed 21:54, 21 August 2006 (UTC)


Please merge Common types and History and milestones

I have just come to this article from the truly bad article Naval Avation because I want to add a see also section to that article in the hope it inspires someone to write an overview article.

In reading this article I found the sections Common types and History and milestones to be overlapping sections which could and should be merged. As the saying goes "a camel is a horse designed by committee", and with theses two separate sections this defiantly looks more like a camel than a horse. --Philip Baird Shearer 13:26, 21 February 2006 (UTC)

Peer Review

I have requested that this article be peer reviewed, and I am currently working on the chnages mentioned so far. Any help would be appreciated. --The1exile - Talk - Contribs - 18:39, 17 April 2006 (UTC)

Reference needed for Admiral's considering Carriers as Battleships

The following quote was temporarily removed. Please provide a source before adding it again. --Edward Sandstig 13:23, 25 June 2006 (UTC)

NOTE: Many modern Admirals and military experts beleive it is apropiate to class the Aircraft Carrier under the Battleship class. A battleship's definition is almost exact to an Aircraft carriers role. For example: Strongest fleet ship, Biggest fleet ship, Flag ship, Command ship, Capital ship and able to make land bombardments with there aircraft.


Wasp and Tarawa class LHA/LHD

USMC's Wasp and Tarawa class LSD should be considered to be included in this article. Even they are not intended as fixed-wing aircraft carrier, they can operate up to 20 AV-8B aircrafts. Therefore, they are somewhat comparable with Royal Navy carriers. Thank's Yudi Denpasar Bali Indonesia

Wood deck, steel deck, safety?

Could someone knowledgeable about the history of carrier decks drop by and comment on Talk:SS United States#Use of wood? Thanks! --jpgordon∇∆∇∆ 00:01, 28 July 2006 (UTC)

"capital ship" in the first paragraph ?

I don't agree with this statement. Maybe a compromise would be to change "fleet" to "surface fleet".

There is or was a British submarine named Dreadnought, which implies that submarines are now the capital ships. One of and perhaps the most important weapon in the Cold War was nuclear missile launching submarines. The attack submarines were designed to destroy missile submarines, which they could not have done, and to destroy aircraft carriers, which they could have and still can do. Aircraft carriers have taken over the former role of cruisers. They project power into far parts of the world against countries that lack effective submarines. David R. Ingham 18:57, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure I understand where you're coming from.
a) Why is the name of the submarine HMS Dreadnought relevant to capital ships?
b) Why couldn't attack submarines kill ballistic missile submarines?
c) Why is a submarine's ability to sink an aircraft carrier relevant?
Certainly aircraft carriers have taken over the role of power-projection which, for a time, was what cruisers did. However, historically a cruiser was simply the smallest ship capable of independent operations whereas an aircraft carrier needs a fleet to support it. Regardless of this, carriers are now the largest and most powerful vessels in a fleet, their ability to control the oceans and littoral regions makes them capital ships. Leading on from this, ballistic missile submarines cannot be used to control the seas; aircraft carriers can and do. Wiki-Ed 19:25, 30 July 2006 (UTC)

Helicopter carrier

Shouldn't we categorize helicopter carriers under aircraft carrier? We mention it in the article. Certainly, not all amphi assault ships are heli-capable, but none of those that are seem to be categorized at Category:aircraft carriers. We should also list seaplane tenders... as an early aircraft carrier variant. (I comment here instead of the category talk page, because people usually never read category talk pages.) 132.205.95.143 01:19, 4 August 2006 (UTC)

Some have been added, good point there. Xxxxxxxxxxx 01:52, 4 August 2006 (UTC)
Given that the term aircraft encompasses both fixed-wing aircraft and rotary-wing aircraft, I agree. --Mmx1 16:40, 4 August 2006 (UTC)


Catapults

"As now only nuclear powered carriers and the two oil-fired carriers USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) and USS Kitty Hawk (CV-63) have boilers as part of their motive power system, the majority of aircraft carriers are now equipped with steam generating plant solely to power the catapults."

Unless I am gravely mistaken, nuclear-powered carriers, CV-67 and CV-63 themselves represent the majority of aircraft carriers using catapults of any stripe. Outside of the US & France, (CVNs and the two CVs mentiond) how many CTOL carriers are there? And how many of these don't use steam turbines? ex-Foch and Kunetsov are the only ones that spring to mind, and they both use steam turbines. If no one objects, in a few days i'll strike this sentence. Does anyone know if modern carriers do have seperate steam generation systems for the catapults? Even better, able to provide a cite? Thanks.

In 2000 Brazil was to have recieved a former French Clemenceau-class carrier, renamed the Sao Paulo. This carrier is equipped with a pair of catapults. -annonymous 12/04/06

That sentence caught my eye as well. But being new to wiki I'm not exactly sure how to go about changing things - will just read and browse for the time being. I can only talk about Kitty Hawk / Kennedy - the steam propulsion on nuclear carriers is different.

There are two types of steam produced by the propulsion boiler - superheated steam which is used in the propulsion turbine and the electric generators and for the production of desuperheated steam. Desuperheated steam is used for everything else - water purification, hotel steam, water heaters, etc. I am not sure if the steam for the catapults is superheated or not, but it definitely comes from the propulsion boiler - not a separate boiler dedicated solely to the catapults. The source of all the steam comes from the propulsion boilers - 8 of them in the case of JFK and Kitty Hawk.

I imagine the nuclear powered carriers are the same, all of the steam comes from one source - the steam generators which are used for the same purposes as in the conventional carriers.

At least on US carriers there is no separate steam source for the catapults that is independent of the propulsion plant.

There are boilers which utilize waste heat from other heat sources to generate steam, but they tend to produce low volume, low pressure, saturated steam that is suitable for water purification, hotel services, but not for catapults.--Skysailor 06:17, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

  • If you wish to challenge the validity of the statement add the template {{citation needed}} after the sentence. This will produce a small box asking for someone to cite the source from which they got that information. If no one adds a citation to the information than you can remove the sentence after an acceptable amount of time has passed; say a week to ten days. TomStar81 (Talk) 09:14, 10 September 2006 (UTC)

GA Re-Review and In-line citations

Note: This article has a very small number of in-line citations for an article of its size and currently would not pass criteria 2b.
Members of the Wikipedia:WikiProject Good articles are in the process of doing a re-review of current Good Article listings to ensure compliance with the standards of the Good Article Criteria. (Discussion of the changes and re-review can be found here). A significant change to the GA criteria is the mandatory use of some sort of in-line citation (In accordance to WP:CITE) to be used in order for an article to pass the verification and reference criteria. Currently this article does not include in-line citations. It is recommended that the article's editors take a look at the inclusion of in-line citations as well as how the article stacks up against the rest of the Good Article criteria. GA reviewers will give you at least a week's time from the date of this notice to work on the in-line citations before doing a full re-review and deciding if the article still merits being considered a Good Article or would need to be de-listed. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us on the Good Article project talk page or you may contact me personally. On behalf of the Good Articles Project, I want to thank you for all the time and effort that you have put into working on this article and improving the overall quality of the Wikipedia project. Agne 20:25, 25 September 2006 (UTC)

Merge with supercarrier

  • Don't Merge --- The Aircraft Carrier article currently has a notice which states: This article is becoming very long. Please consider transferring content to subtopic articles where appropriate. In light of this, it might be batter to flesh out Supercarrier with info from the other page. -BillCJ 01:39, 8 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Merge and then split again. I'd merge Supercarrier to here but start a new article for the earlier versions at History of the Aircraft Carrier or similar. The Land 12:23, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
  • Merge --- Any relevant info from the supercarrier article (and there is not much) should be included under modern carriers in this article and 'supercarrier' should redirect to it. The history of the design definitely should not be disassociated. The speculative section on future carriers could perhaps move somewhere else though - it's not very encyclopaedic. Wiki-Ed 14:53, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
    Can I ask why you want to keep the historical material in here? It is already lengthy and has the potential to be much lenghtier; the normal practice is to split off history sections when page length becomes an isse. The Land 15:13, 11 October 2006 (UTC)
Is it normal practice? Most warship articles work in exactly the same way. An encyclopedia is about past and present; not what might or might not happen in the future. You can't really talk about a human-created thing without covering its history, and you can't talk about the future of that object without bringing in speculation. Moreover, if you moved all the historical material to another article you'd just create another very long article and this one would become devoid of content. Wiki-Ed 10:22, 12 October 2006 (UTC)
As a starting point, I'd suggest we move the sections currently numbered 3 to 6 to a history article. That would leave half of the article, including the overview, the brief historical sumamr yat the beginning, and the lovely detailed material about the current and future carriers. If any really necessary information is lost to the current article we can add it back in. The current article is just too long, and other long warship articles will eventually go the same way. I think it is fair to say that someone looking for information about aircraft carriers now will only find information about Civil War balloon-carrying ships tangential at best, and that anyone researching historic carriers is less interested in current and future developments. The Land 11:41, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
Hmm, well I think you and I will have to disagree there. I am interested in future developments (as much as BillCJ) but I am also interested in seeing how they reached the stage they are at. Anyway, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with a lengthy article - that's what the contents box is for. There is no guarantee that people who can't be bothered to read past sections that do not interest them would be any more bothered to read through the sections that nominally do interest them to find the information they want. I think encyclopedias exist to combat selective reading and interpretation. Where is the strength deck located and why is it in that place? Why do carriers have funny angled decks? Why does the US have so many carriers? All these questions need historical background to be answered fully. Wiki-Ed 12:10, 13 October 2006 (UTC)


I for one am very interested in the future developments of aircraft carriers. As detailed in that section, several nations are pursuing carriers larger than what they currently have in service. As to the information not being very "encyclopedic", most enclyclopedias are several years old, and do not have the advantage of being updated on a day-to-day basis. I feel this is advantageous to Wikipedia, as we can update the articles as new ifo becomes available. I don't see why the info should be placed in another article on that basis alone.

However, the article is very long at present. The concensus so far seems to be that the article should not be cut down (info deleted) unless some sections are split off. While this is usually done with the history sections, the history here is spread though-out the article, making separating it problematic. We could discuss various ways to spilt the article, and see what we come up with.

Here are some ideas for spliting the article:

  • Split off all the history, and add more info on helicopter and amhibious carriers (LHAs/LHDs).
  • Split off the early development and WWII history, keeping Post-war history/developments, and possibly absorbing the Supercarrier article into this one.
  • Moving most info on the Supercarrier to that page.
  • Split off Future carrier developments.
  • Split off the Flight Deck section to the Flight Deck article.

--BillCJ 18:43, 11 October 2006 (UTC)

Bump. WP:SIZE says that articles over 50kb should definitely be split, for a while range of reasons. The quesiton is not really whehter we split this article but how. I can't actualyl see any option but to split out hte history. The Land 15:03, 17 October 2006 (UTC)

Consensus: There is no one consensus, other than an agreement that somehing needs to be done. Due to lack of any recent talk on this, I'm removing the length and merge tags. Thanks. -- BillCJ 02:36, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

New Russian carriers

Russia is currently developing a new aircraft carrier design. They are starting from scratch to make a modern model, with the newest available materials and electronics. Requirements would be for two aircraft carriers - one for the Russian Northern Fleet and one for the Russian Pacific Fleet. Construction is set to begin by 2010, and finish in around 6 years. The Ulyanovsk supercarrier design is being revised.'

So, if the Ulyanovsk supercarrier design is being revised (assumingly for the new carrier), how are they starting from scratch?? I am hesitant to delete either phrase without knowing which one is accurate. -BillCJ 01:45, 8 October 2006 (UTC)

Carrier History Source

The US Naval Historical Center has a pdf copy of an out-of-print book ('Evolution of Aircraft Carriers') at this site [1]. It contains excellent information of the development of carriers up to the 60's, including by the Japanese. It even has info on the aborted German and Italian carrier programs during WW2. This might help us to flesh out the historical section, especially if we split it off the main article. -BillCJ 18:55, 13 October 2006 (UTC)

Aircraft section

Aircrafts

There have been many aircraft on carriers. In the past, there have been fighters such as the A-6 Intruder. Now, in the modern age, VERY rarely the F-14s are being used in the US Army. They have been said that they are finishing their last tour in the pacific now. The most used aircraft now is the F/A- 18 Super Hornet, used by most navies.

I removed this section from the end of the "Future aircraft carriers" section. I have posted the section above rather than deleting it completely to stimulate discussion. It was apparently written by someone for whom English is not a first language (I'm assuming good faith here).

I do think it might be a good idea to briefly cover arcraft types operated off of carriers (biplanes, radial monoplanes, early jets, modern jets, helicopters replacing seaplanes, etc.) However, I don't know if the omission of the topic has been a deliberate decision, or just an oversight. A well-written, concise paragraph or two on the types of aircraft operated on carriers (not a list of every single aircraft) could be usefull. --BillCJ 00:23, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

Angled decks

I don't get the explanation. The early runways ran the full length of the deck and stored planes at the end. They angled the decks so planes overshooting the runway will miss the planes at the end. Why not have the runway go the full length of the deck, either down the middle or off to the side, and then have the aircraft storage off to the side? --Gbleem 11:31, 17 December 2006 (UTC)

This is explained in the article. The early designs did go down the full length of the deck. They changed it because of accidents and also to allow simultaneous launching and recovery of aircraft. Wiki-Ed 11:41, 18 December 2006 (UTC)

History; First Hermes

I have removed the assertion that she served in the Dardanelles Campaign as she was sunk in October 1914. Searching the web, all references agree on the date and means of her sinking, but I can find no reference to her having survived the extra 4 months to even the beginning of the Dardanelles. Only one assertion can be right, so I have gone with the majority. Anyone with more info?DylanThomas 01:32, 26 December 2006 (UTC)