Comments by "Jim Taylor" (@jimtaylor294) on "HMS Unicorn (I72) - Guide 367" video.

...and by the uselessness of politicians in general 😅
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And Olympic, who served as - and was partially designed to be - an auxiliary Cruiser 😉 . (carrying deck guns for a time, and cleaving a U Boat in half when the latter tried & failed to Torpedo her)
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For the longest time I saw Unicorn as being Ark Royal (71)'s nearest thing to a sister ship; partially due to her shape & placement of guns 🤔 . Didn't know she was a victim of the late-'50's mismanagement and cutbacks swath thpugh; the uselessness of our politicians almost knows no bounds 🤦‍♂️ . (after all; you would think the Implacables would've had priority over Victorious, as the latter was an older, smaller & wartorn ship... but whomever said political decisions had rational basis 😅)
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Indeed. HMS Fearless & Intrepid partially filled this role, though one wonders what a modified Centaur class (Centaur herself or Albion perhaps) could have achieved as Mantainance Carriers 🤔 (especially as the Centaurs were slightly too small for the work Ark Royal & Eagle were employed in; as Hermes's limited capacity for Buccaneers demonstrated)
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@MattVF IIRC the only reason the Tigers' weren't sent too was they lacked the crews to do so, which indeed was a longstanding issue 🤔. (longer than some think, as back in WWI they had to get creative in order to crew up HMS Agincourt, and other unexpected ships originally being built for export) Heck: when the RN found out a senate debate was going on in the USA as to loaning the UK a Carrier, the RN response was something like "thankyou for the thoughtful gesture, but we don't have enough personnel to hand for a ship that size 😅".
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^ Good point re' the 2nd Sub' encounter, but I should note that the UK Gov' certainly saw the Olympics as candidates for auxiliary Cruisers (the actual practicality thereof was a typically ignored), and as such hardpoints for guns and a handful of other stipulations were made of White Star, Cunard & other lines, in return for government subsidiaries toward the cost of the ships. The Lusitania & Mauritania are better known for this snippet of pre-WWI government meddling though.
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Had post-WWI negotiations on fleet sizes decided the newly independent Poland needed a couple of small Dreadnoughts or Cruisers (to balance out Germany's residual navy), what ships would the Poles most likely have been sold/given, and which would have fitted the role best?. (given various ostensibly poor countries had a Battleship or attempted to get them, something to deter / fend off German Pre-Dreadnoughts [like the Lord Nelson twins] certainly made tactical sense)
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@WALTERBROADDUS Opinion noted, but irrelevant (as this isn't your Q&A section)... and demonstrably untrue as well, as 1939 proved the Polish lack of a counter for any of the German Capital Ships, giving the Schleswig-Holstein free reign to demolish their fortresses in Westerplatte, disrupt Polish troops movements and so much more, functionally unopposed. Denmark similarly was walked over, as unlike Sweden, Finland & Norway they & Poland lacked even a Coastal Defence Ship or two, meaning even ancient ships like Schleswig-Holstein could walk all over them. Given Poland was a military dictatorship at the time, this gap in defence capabilities is even more ironic, and interesting. (at least in the contemporary Dutch case of naval capability gaps we know they tried to develop a counter for the Scharnhorst's, only to be too slow in getting their ships built)
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