Shipbucket

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.



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.

I like the look. It gives off the impression of the massiveness of a battleship conversion.

A couple of comments with my opinions:

You could probably make the stack smaller. The Colorado-class only had two stacks, so you could probably get away with a stack 2/3 the size of the one that you have currently. That would also give you the space for an 8" battery if you choose to go that route. It would also probably mean that you could reduce the air intakes to two as well.

Your aircraft control stations on the aft side of the stack look straight into the back of the 6" mounts.

The stern has a pretty substantial redesign compared to the original hull. If you look at the Lexington conversion you see that the support for the flight deck came directly up from the stern. There isn't a lot of width there in the Washington's hull to support lengthening as you chose.

Double check the placement of the forward boat boom. It appears the penetrate the bottom of the starboard forward sponson.

I could get into a litany of reasons why this conversation probably wouldn't make a ton of operational sense, but it's very nicely drawn. I echo matedow's technical comments.

One minor detail that seems goofed up: the forward boat boom seems to have some rigging covered up by 5/25 positions.

Nice like the improvements, I agree with Matedow that the 8" would make more sense.

Doesn't look half bad! Though I don't know if she would've kept her original name.

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I think it looks good.
My only concern would be topweight without bulging the original hull, the shift of the metacentric height and the island concentrating weight on one side would have some effects.
Early conversions like HMS Eagle were mainly structure bolted on top with lots of 'holes' in the side, here the enclosed bow and stern is going to add a lot of weight.

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She looks like a modern idea of a carrier dialed back a few centuries. Looks great!

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Hood, I'd expect her to lose a lot of armored deck and probably take on ballast in return. Although honestly, I'm not sure how thick decks were circa 1919.