Originally Posted by
Pontius Navigator
Some years ago the Captain of Ark Royal reckoned that the capacity of a modern CV was one aircraft per 1,000 tons. On that basis he said the QE could have 65 aircraft. Clearly we have compromised - big carrier, smaller air group.
There are caveats to that. If we really wanted to - and bought enough aircraft - you could fit 60-ish on the deck and hangar. But operating them would require extensive deck manoeuvres, which means lots more bodies, which means lots more accommodation. You could reduce the accommodation standard and cram more people aboard, but it's people that cost, hence the big ship to allow a relatively small number of people to operate up to 40 cabs.
The old Ark (IV) managed around 36 cabs on 56000 te - so quite a bit more than 1000te/cab - and required 2500 crew.
As for cats - the design still included provision for boiler rooms until at least 2007 (nigh-on cutting steel). EMALS provision was made in the power architecture, but somewhat hampered by both the IT*R status of the kit (and hence access to info) and level of maturity at that time. There's enough wiggly amps (nigh on 120MW) of installed generating capacity to cover off the propulsion load (80MW) and still leave a lot for electrical services....