Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Aircraft Carriers - From Kite Carriers to Conversions (1800-1928)" video.

  1. As luck would have it, I recently read the Friedman book on aircraft carriers. In 1918, with zero experience with carriers, the pro-aviation faction of the USN had decided that it wanted carriers 825' long, displacing 24,000 tons with 140,000hp. By 1920, their ambition had grown to 35,000 tons, 180,000hp and they wanted six of them, now! Sounds like they were eying the Lexington class battlecruisers for conversion before they were even laid down. Not surprisingly, when the Washington treaty resulted in the cancellation of the battlecruisers, the pro-aviation faction was ready with a proposal to convert two of them to carriers, committing nearly half of the US' allowable carrier tonnage, while the USN still had little first hand experience in building and operating carriers. The Lexingtons were horribly inefficient carriers, which particularly mattered in the post Washington Treaty environment they were built in. Yorktown and Essex each have hangar decks 200' longer than Lexington, on lower displacement. It the 2 Lexington's had never been built, that would have freed up tonnage to follow Yorktown and Enterprise with 3 carriers of near Essex size, or 4 more Yorktowns, putting the USN in a much better position at the end of 41 with a net gain of 1 or 2 fleet carriers.
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