An alternative from Ark Royal's design generation combined an armoured deck with two nearly full-length hangars and sixteen 4.5-inch guns. Its island was roughly half as long again as Ark Royal's, and the design included torpedo bulges. A paper submitted to the First Lord of the Admiralty gave a standard displacement of 27,000 tons, but the Director of Naval Construction's report has not been located in the research described here. The other figures suggest nearer 28,000 tons, so that higher displacement remains an estimate. A calculation using the stowed dimensions of the Grumman Avenger suggested room for about 74 Avengers. Replacing part of that force with smaller fighters produced an estimated mixed group of around 90 wartime aircraft, illustrating how much the aircraft mix affects quoted carrier capacity.
Notable Point · 19:00-21:43
An enlarged Ark Royal design with room for about 90 aircraft
A larger Ark Royal alternative combined two long hangars with an armoured deck, though its estimated displacement and air group depend on incomplete design evidence and aircraft dimensions.