@Drachinifel & Dr Clarke Discuss Royal Navy Aircraft Carriers that almost were! #2Historians ep 1

Convert two surviving Admiral-class battlecruiser hulls into large carriers, accepting the loss of Courageous and Glorious to gain a faster, more capable interwar carrier core.

References to Admiral-class conversion studies help explain Cammell Laird's reputation as a strike-carrier specialist before building Ark Royal.

Large Admiral-class conversions might have raised naval aviation's institutional status and improved the Royal Navy's influence over aircraft requirements.

Several naval and Air Ministry offices separated Fleet Air Arm experience from the engineers designing its aircraft.

The alternate fleet assigns older and smaller carriers to support, training, cruiser, and regional duties around two large strike carriers.

Argus's Queen Bee aircraft put drone operations at sea decades before modern uncrewed carrier proposals.

Large Admiral-class conversions could encourage twin-engine naval aircraft and alter the hangar layout of later carriers.

A Wasp-style lift could free internal space while allowing heavy doors to close the hangar against North Sea weather.

The Blackburn Blackburn combined naval spotting equipment with visual warning of approaching aircraft.

Restarting all three suspended Admiral-class hulls as carriers would change the fleet Britain brought to the Washington negotiations.

The Royal Navy distinguished strike-carrier, fleet-carrier, and cruiser-carrier concepts between the wars.

The ideal late-interwar design combines Ark Royal's air group with armor, while larger surviving carriers make multi-carrier operations more attainable.

Far East deployment made repair distance a carrier-design problem, while the RAF reinforcement plan required the same ships to ferry aircraft east.

Replacing Courageous and Glorious with larger Admiral conversions changes both the damage the fleet carriers might survive and which ships should accept convoy and submarine-hunting risk.

A larger replacement for Glorious could rescue RAF aircraft while maintaining reconnaissance, giving it time to avoid or attack the German battlecruisers.

The Navy financed the Fleet Air Arm even while the Air Ministry administered pilots, contracts, and the route to aircraft manufacturers.

British Malta and American Midway designs approached a common compromise between armored flight decks, large air groups, and ventilated hangars.

Pacific sea room, confined British operating areas and North Sea weather produced different compromises between aircraft capacity, protection and hangar ventilation.

Artificial exercise boundaries could exaggerate the ability of cruisers to find carriers and distort which ships attacking aircraft would choose.

The survivors included the Illustrious and Implacable classes, Unicorn and the elderly Furious and Argus, with Colossus and Majestic light carriers coming into service. The proposed plan retires the worn Illustrious class from front-line service and retains the Implacables temporarily.

Repeated high-speed flight operations gave aircraft carriers destroyer-like machinery wear, leaving the Illustrious class with little economical postwar life.

A staged program uses light carriers for experiments before completing Audacious and Malta hulls with mature jet-age features.

The Centaur class becomes a purposefully limited helicopter, amphibious-assault, and command layer beneath the larger Audacious and Malta carrier force.

The largest alternate carriers inherit the Royal Navy's most prestigious carrier names, with Africa treated as the Malta-class hull most easily renamed.

A layered fleet protects four Malta-class strike carriers by offering less capable ships for successive budget reductions.

Hull wear, machinery condition, and growing aircraft would put Malta replacements into construction in the early-to-mid 1980s.

A sustained British carrier force could anchor NATO's Atlantic strike command and become a routine instrument of prime-ministerial signaling.

A caveated Soviet targeting story illustrates how propaganda, hierarchy, and fear can preserve factual errors inside a technically powerful state.

Four identical carriers could keep two hulls at sea and surge a third by changing the Royal Marines support ship's air group.

A helicopter-heavy carrier with fighters and Hawkeyes could protect amphibious movement, while a larger Fearless force carried the Royal Marines.

It was physically possible, but the required airframe redesign and the limited advantages over existing naval aircraft made it an unattractive alternative to the F-14.

Sustained naval aircraft orders could support a Sea Vixen successor, while larger decks simplify the alternative of operating Phantoms.

The proposed Super Jaguar turns an existing rough-field attack-aircraft family into a shared British and French carrier strike program.

Rolling takeoffs could get defensive fighters airborne while the carrier's catapults launched strike aircraft.

Supersonic V/STOL fighters could give merchant ships a limited self-defense role against Soviet bomber raids without creating full auxiliary carriers.

In the video's present-day scenario, carriers commissioned around 1990 still have useful service ahead, with replacement planning and the F-35B/F-35C choice remaining open.

The preferred Queen Elizabeth design combines catapults and F-35Cs, while small reductions in hangar size can remove a large share of the air group.

A larger hangar is favoured, although folded F-35Cs would occupy less width than F-35Bs. Space for complete squadrons and fixed-wing airborne early-warning aircraft also matters.

A carrier's striking power can change with its aircraft while the ship continues to provide the mobile base those aircraft need.

Construction docks, gates, and bridges can determine carrier dimensions before the desired air group has been fully accommodated.

A larger carrier fleet could create a Merseyside base whose employment and local political support would help protect carrier numbers.

Naming four carriers London, Cardiff, Edinburgh, and Belfast would make cancellations politically costly across the United Kingdom.

Project Ark Royal leaves open how crewed aircraft and drones would divide carrier missions and whether drones would be supporting aircraft or equivalent combat assets.

Small reconnaissance drones in Ukraine suggest how autonomous threat detection and evasive manoeuvres could improve the survivability of larger uncrewed aircraft.

A cheap long-range drone could deliver many smaller autonomous drones, recreating the Cold War requirement to destroy bombers before weapon release.

The alternate carrier programme bypasses CV(A)-01 and frames the central-front defence settlement as a loss of Britain's distinctive maritime contribution to NATO.

The Kongo-class aside shows why warship classification can change as reconstruction alters protection, subdivision, and hull characteristics.

Carrier hangars support diplomacy as well as aircraft, while a varied fleet gives governments more rungs on the ladder between routine presence and combat.