Allanea wrote:On the other hand - and I don't know if this is true or not - as we all know , the sortie generation rate of an aircraft carrier drops precipitously after the first 1-2 days of operation due to ground crew, pilot and airframe fatigue. Would a larger carrier (perhaps a slightly larger carrier, rather than a 650,000 monster) be able to push high sortie rates for, say, a day or two longer due to having more spare pilots and crews, or better facilities?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aircraft_ ... Royal_Navy
It was a thing in WW2, when carriers were smol, planes were smoller, and you could flatpack aircraft and assemble them in reasonable timeframes. Nowadays, if your aircraft is fatigued it's out of the fight until it sees a shore depot anyway. You can't put this in a boat: http://aviationhumor.net/wp-content/upl ... uction.jpg
Which is essentially what depot carriers were: Aircraft factories at sea. They were made obsolete because anything that can be performed in-situ can already be done on an attack carrier of ~100,000-120,000 tons. Anything more means your pilots are dead or captured and your planes are glorified scrap or need to be sent back to the factory for repair/replacement.
Simple surge loading does everything you want. A Nimitz can sustain about 5-7 days of high intensity combat before running out of ammunition and fuel, when augmented sufficiently with surplus personnel.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/72o3l1lt4v775 ... .pdf?raw=1
You don't really need any more than 700-800 sorties a week anyway. The maximum sustained sortie rate for a USN carrier is probably 170/day with surge loading. So about 800-ish a week until it runs out of ammo and fuel.
e: Though the maximum design surge for Ford is about 270 (no one knows if it could ever reach this without an actual demonstration), the sustained sortie rate is 160, which is about what Nimitz put out without augmentation. Nimitz also successfully produced ~260 sorties/day with surge loading.
So 270's probably where the sigmoid function plateaus. Any improvements in tonnage and size won't really increase the number of sorties overall, although it might decrease the number of sorties per airframe. However, adding additional carriers will improve the sortie rate linearly, at a rate of ~260-270 sorties/day/carrier, which means that you can side-step the plateau by having a second carrier support the first if you really, really, really need two thousand sorties a week.
Thus we discover why this existed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_Carrier_Task_Force and why Forrestals and Kitty Hawks off Vietnam operated in groups with each other and the Essexes to maximize their striking power, rather than the US Navy building leviathan monster carriers with multiple hulls and parallel runways.
And a couple 20k tonne "battlecruiser" thingies. They exist for the purpose of flooding the battlespace with missile delivered heavyweight torps, and supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles. And firing off SAMs at things. They basically do what my smaller, more useful ships do. Just bigger. And a bit of an eyesore in the fleet, but enough to keep poorly informed politicians happy with impressive sounding terminology after they shoved it through the budget office.
