Carrier baselines before wartime shortcuts

The prewar carriers and support ships provide design reference points rather than simple success-or-failure examples. The US Navy's reluctance to send Ranger to the Pacific was so pronounced that Admiral King accepted HMS Victorious there as USS Robin instead, despite his resistance to British advice. Wasp offers a more useful American minimum fleet-carrier model, though its deck-edge lift was too complicated to reproduce on the later cruiser-hull conversions. Ryujo shows the instability and weight penalties created by squeezing fleet-carrier ambitions into treaty tonnage. Hermes supplied the Royal Navy's cruiser-carrier baseline, while Unicorn's forward aviation support design fed into a broader family of British wartime carriers.