If France can find the francs, yes.

Work on their design began in ~1936-37, and they were thought at that time to be a sufficient improvement on the Illustrious design.

To get something very different ready would slow things down considerably… it took (at the time) a couple of years and hundreds of engineers & draftsmen to produce a new (or significantly modified) major ship design.

Which was better, Implacable and Indefatigable a bit small & cramped, but in service May/August 1944… or mid-1946 (and still smaller than the Audacious class… and still with cramped double-hangars [probably 16′ both])?

Or that Polish pilots are experiencing the same difficulties transitioning to the F-16 that USAF pilots did?

That he was able to “regain control” seems to indicate that the aircraft was working fine, the pilot just lost control of it momentarily.

Russia to build nuclear-powered 60,000-ton aircraft carrier

MOSCOW, February 27 (RIA Novosti) – Russia’s new-generation aircraft carrier will be nuclear powered and have a displacement of up to 60,000 metric tons, a United Shipbuilding Corporation executive said on Friday.

So far the Russian Navy only has one aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov Project 1143.5, built in 1985, with a displacement of 55,000 metric tons, a crew of 1,500, and capability to carry more than 50 aircraft.

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20090227/120342249.html

Yep… that’s the P 1143.7 Ul’yanovsk all right… the CVN the Soviets were going to build as a follow-on to Kuznetsov.

Ul’yanovsk- laid down: 25th November 1988; launched: N/A; fate: scrapped starting on 4 Feb 1992

Builders: Nikolaiev South, Nikolaiev,Russia

Dimensions: 1089′ x 130′ x 35′ / 331.90m x 39.62m x 10.60m

Displacement: 80,000 tons max

Complement: N/A

Armament:
2 x RBU6000 AS mortars
8 x 30mm AK-630 CIWS
12 x VLS launchers for SS-N-19 Shipwreck / Granit SSM (12 rounds in total)
24 x VLS launchers for SA-N-11 Gauntlet / Kinzhal SAM (192 rounds in total)

Aircraft Facilities: The flight deck measures 1,065′ x 248′. Normally 70 would have been carried, made up of Su-27K, Su-25K and Ka-27 helicopters. Four catapults would have been fitted.

Armour: None known.

Powerplant: Four PWR reactors would have been carried, driving 4 steam turbines providing a total of 240,000 shp on 4 shafts.
Maximum speed was 30+kts.

Electronics Fit:
Radar: Sky Watch 3D air search; Palm Frond navigation

Sonar: MG-342 Orion / Horse Jaw hull mounted; MG-335 Platina / Horse Tail towed array

Other: Trap Door fire control; Tsunami communications; Salgir navigation

Miscellaneous: A towed torpedo decoy system was to be fitted.

Won’t affect the merlin at all, you guys will almnost certainly have to pay penalties, any airframes will probably be snapped up by the RN as cheap as they can get them

The airframes are not standard airframes.

The design was to be modified to meet special requirements, and to be assembled in the US by Lockheed Martin, with some components manufactured in the UK, some from Italy, and some from the US.

If the UK wants them… see Chinook HC3 fiasco.

Delivered in 2001-May 2002 with UK-special equipment, Boeing certified them as 100% safe/operational, UK demanded full access to software, etc so they could completely re-certify them (since the Americans are incompetent to say if an aircraft is safe), Boeing said “no”… helos are still in storage “because they are unsafe to fly”.

You think Lock-mart or the US government will let the UK have 100% access to everything about aircraft designed to fly the President? No way!

They were the conceptual (if not actual) heirs to the “trade-protection carrier” concept of the late 1930s.

As most merchies tended to have a max speed of around 20 kn (and a cruise speed of around 15 kn), 26 kn (original designed speed… the lower numbers were for the heavier, deeper-in-the-water modernized ones) was a fine speed.

Wasn’t hard for me… there have been recent (in the last year) threads on a couple of military boards I frequent discussing the fort.

I first learned about it in a National Geographic Magazine article in the 1970s.

Here is a website dedicated to Fort Drum:
http://www.concretebattleship.org/

http://corregidor.org/chs_battery1/drum.htm

http://www.travelsmart.net/ph/inquirer/issues/dec98/dec06/features/fea_main.htm

A nice long discussion here: http://warships1discussionboards.yuku.com/topic/6798?page=1