The closing counterfactual compares the incomplete Admiral-class hulls with HMS Courageous, HMS Glorious, and HMS Furious as candidates for carrier conversion. The Admiral-class ships were larger and less advanced in construction, leaving naval architects something closer to a blank canvas than the ships actually converted. Their fast hulls were not perfect carrier forms, but they offered fewer inherited structures to work around. The Royal Navy was already considering deck-edge lifts and might have incorporated them into large conversions available from the late 1920s. The result remains a possibility rather than established history: earlier large carriers could have changed British aviation practice, reputation, and readiness entering the Second World War.
Notable Point · 21:25-22:49
Admiral-class carrier conversion counterfactual
Converting less-complete Admiral-class battlecruiser hulls could have produced larger British carriers with deck-edge lifts in the late 1920s.