Comments by "Steve Valley" (@stevevalley7835) on "Aircraft Carriers - The Fleet Aircraft Carrier in the Interwar Years (1929-1939)" video.

There was a loophole in the Washington treaty the Brits could have exploited. According to the treaty, any carrier in commission or building, at the time of the treaty, was regarded as experimental and exempt from the treaty's replacement schedule, meaning they could be replaced with new carriers at any time. Argus, Eagle and Hermes all met that criteria. Eagle wasn't that bad. It had a bit of speed and a bit of size. It could cruse with a division of QEs and provide CAP and recon. But Argus had no speed and Hermes had no size. Argus and Hermes could both have been reclassified as something non-carrier, like sub tenders, and free up enough tonnage to build a second Ark Royal.
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This was a fascinating time for carrier development. I have offered, from time to time, that the USN was nuts building the Lexingtons. The USN had so little experience with Langley, and a bit of advice from the Brits, that they really didn't know what they were doing. It's a miracle the Lexingtons came out as well as they did. On the other hand, without the Lexingtons, there would have been enough tonnage in the treaty quota to build three more Yorktowns, with enough left over to build Wasp as another full sized Yorktown, or enough tonnage to build three 27,000 ton proto-Essexes, while refusing to go along with the Brit's push to cut carrier tonnage to only 23,000.
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@RedXlV early studies in carrier design found that, when a pilot messed up his approach, he tended to turn left to go around. That preference for a left turn is probably due to the engine's torque making it easier to turn left. A port side island gets in the way.
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@davidford85 I would suspect the shift in thinking came in the late 30s. Kaga and Akagi were both originally built with both hangars open at the bow, so, in theory, they had three decks that planes could be launched on. That feature was eliminated in favor of a full length flight deck on both ships in late 30s reconstructions.
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@harrisonrawlinson5650 the rule of thumb on air launched torps was to allow a minimum of 500 yards to allow the torp to come up to running depth after the plunge from the drop, and arm itself. That run would probably need to be done in daylight for visibility to be good enough to judge the drop. An RAF Beaufort penetrated the harbor at Brest and torpedoed Gneisenau. The Beaufort was shot down and all three crew killed before it cleared the harbor basin. The Brit Mk 12 aerial torp only had a 388lb warhead. Campbeltown carried 4.5 tons of explosives. Probably a hole or a dent in the gate from a torp could have been patched pretty easily. Campbeltown pretty well wrecked the gates, and the inrush of water carried the wreck of the ship into the dock. Meanwhile, the commandos had wrecked the pumps and valves that operated the dock. Repairs were not completed until after the war.
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@its1110 that developmental work could have been done with Ranger. As Drac's video said, in war games it was found that "a carrier found is a carrier sunk", and the Navy was very concerned about having nearly half of it's carrier tonnage allotment under the treaty tied up in only two ships. The USN did a lot of work in trying to divy up the remaining tonnage in a large number of small ships but decided that a ship as small as Ranger wasn't really up to the job, hence the move back to a larger hull with the Yorktowns.
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