A while back I saw a carrier conversion of USS Washington (the incomplete Colorado class, not the famous night battler) posted here on the forum in a 'what if' scenario of the US decided to spend some of their precious WNT carrier tonnage on a slow, fat battleship hull. The why sort of eludes me since the hull is not optimal for carrier usage by any stretch of the imagination, but my best guess is that if war was impending and seemed likely within the next few years, the US would want more carriers immediately. Justifications aside, the 'why' didn't bother me as much as the 'how', since the conversion looked entirely too much like the Yorktown class ships of the mid 1930s and nowhere near enough like the Lexington class which were also from the mid-late 1920s, and were conversions, just as this ship would be. So I set out to try and rebuild the drawing based on what a smaller, shorter carrier conversion built in parallel with the Lexington class ships would look like. That is to say, it would look like a smaller Lexington.
![[ img ]](https://i.imgur.com/A2lEEbb.png)
The most major changes include a superstructure that is essentially a cut-down version of the one on Lexington, and a mirrored gun armament of four twin 6"/53 guns of the same type used on Omaha, arranged around the bridge in the same pattern as the twin 8"/55 mounts on Lexington. The stern and bow are also enclosed and this more closely matches her bigger cousins, and the anachronistic 5"/38s from the original have been replaced with more period appropriate 5"/25s.
I think with these simple changes it looks much more realistic for a conversion of the period, and in general just a cooler looking ship in general. Feel free to leave feedback and comments below.