Why Saratoga would have made a singular museum ship

Which sunk ship should have survived as a museum?

Saratoga, because she combined a rare prewar carrier with the surviving hull evidence of an American battlecruiser design.

Saratoga would preserve a prewar American carrier design absent from surviving museum collections. Her conversion would also retain physical evidence of the Lexington-class battlecruiser concept beneath the flight deck. That gives her additional value beyond another example of a wartime carrier type already preserved. The armour arrangement matters to the argument over whether the original design should be described as a battlecruiser or a fast battleship. Her loss in the July 1946 atomic tests is recalled as the reason she meets the question's requirement for a ship that sank, although other recollections of her fate conflict.