"I'm thinking we should put some airfields in the water."
"What, extend the runway with an artificial island? We've done that a few-"
"No, I mean, like, middle of the ocean."
"On an island in the middle of the ocean?"
"NO! I'm saying we put it on a boat. Like a real big boat. And that boat is the airfield. So we can move it!"
"But that... how would that even... even if the boat is huge, how could you possibly get enough runway?"
"Well it doesn't need to be _any_ kind of plane. But probably jet fighters. And bombers."
"shaking head I just did the math and even if we make this boat ridiculously long, that's just not enough runway for a plane to reliably take off, and if they didn't they'd just be dunked into the ocean!"
"Hm. Well. What if we use some kind of catapult?"
"Excuse me?!?"
"I don't know, some kind of airplane catapult to launch them. You figure it out."
"...An 'airplane catapult'?"
"Sounds fine to me."
"blusters but even if.. I mean, assuming if... okay. Let's just pretend we built this ridiculous airplane catapult of yours. We'd still need to basically build a boat the size of a medium-sized village. You'd need like 2 battleship crews' worth of personnel to operate that thing!"
"So?"
"What do you mean 'so'?"
"We have the sailors, don't we?"
"How would we even move the dang thing?"
"I don't know, a nucular reactor or whatever, let the eggheads take care of it."
You of course know that early aircraft carriers didn't have catapults or arresting gear because planes didn't need to go very fast to take off. Just stick some planks on an existing ship and you're good to go.
Of course, then the planes got faster, the sunk-cost fallacy starts to kick in, and nobody tells them to stop.
@TomF@mastodon.gamedev.place
One of the early UK carriers was converted from a standard battleship, and all through its life they kept on thinking maybe they should convert it back again, so they didn't make very large changes to it, and it was always a bit of a crap carrier because of that.
