The missed modernization choice

The Implacable-class ships were larger, less worn, and better suited to the type of modernization attempted on HMS Victorious. A four-carrier force built around the Audacious and Implacable classes would also have been more homogeneous, with completion of all four Malta-class ships as the other coherent option. Victorious was intended to expose conversion problems before the larger carriers followed, but her rebuild consumed enough time and money to collapse the wider plan. Her wartime record, including the service remembered by the nickname USS Robin, also supported preserving her as a museum ship while converting an Implacable instead. Indefatigable was already in reserve and could have entered reconstruction rather than recommissioning in 1949, while Implacable's training role did not make her irreplaceable. Their disposal in the mid-1950s ended careers barely a decade long and left Ark Royal and Eagle without two modernized Implacable-class partners.