[Little Ray]

They must be impressed by the performance of their new toy.
At least they’re not building carrier / cruisers. I have always thought those were stupid ideas.

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Now this is a Flying Shark.

[Lazamataz]

We are so screwed.

[Robert A Cook PE]

So put ONE catapult (or just ONE Pair of catapults)ANGLED off the side landing/recovery ramp, and leave the ski jump off the front for the rest.

Now, if the catapult area is down (bomb or rocket damage), or the catapult OR recovery systems and retrieval systems OR steam systems OR deck area is damaged, the US carriers can’t launch any airplane at all.

They work just fine. Until damaged.

[stinkerpot65]

Obama has probably already given them the catapult designs.

[StoneWall Brigade]

Ping

[tacticalogic]

That comes at a price; they are only suitable for launching fighter/attack jets, which have a high enough thrust/weight ratio to reach high speeds needed to launch off a ski ramp.

Seems like it would be hard on the landing gear, too.

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The Soviet effort to build aircraft carriers was an unmitigated disaster. If you can imagine a ship designed by bureaucrats, not naval engineers and shipbuilders.

For example, they never could master Nimitz sized stabilization, so at least once, one of their carriers didn’t even get out of port before floundering.

So making much smaller carriers, they carefully calculated the minimal deck space needed for landings. Only after building it did they realize that much of the deck space was needed for inactive aircraft, because they could not store them below deck.

The way around this was to cantilever extra landing space to the deck, at the expense of stabilization. But once this was done, the bureaucrats struck again, saying that with that much more deck space, they should be able to carry two more planes.

They never did get around to building a decent carrier. So they never got to experience two really bad problems.

The first of these is the paradox, that a well trained and practiced crew are essential to carrier operations. But the only place they can get trained and practiced is on an operational carrier. America has had a hundred years to learn how to operate carriers, at the cost of many lives.

The other problem is highly expert damage control. In WWII, the Japanese had not yet learned this, which cost them carriers. However, several US carriers had been pretty much blown apart, but were able to recover enough to get to port and repair. This perplexed the Japanese who were certain they had sunk those ships, only to see them returned to duty in relatively short order.

[Billthedrill]

Now it’s freakin’ skateboard ramps. Special Services is out of control again...