Shipbucket

Hello shipbucket as a lurker of this lovely site I stumbled upon this thread basically asking what if during the cold war we sold essex class to our allies.
So, what would a modernized essex look like?

http://www.whatifmodelers.com/index.php?topic=8937.0

Discuss

What would it look like? Scrapped or otherwise retired, which is why they're all in this state for a reason. Any Essex serving in any navy would be arguably the oldest capital combatant actively serving in the world. Off the top of my head, only the Sao Paulo/ex-Foch even comes close to being in the same vintage, especially carrier-wise (it's ten years newer than an Essex that would've just missed WWII and a good 15 or so years newer by design lineage). The ex-Hermes/Vikrant, while its design lineage is of a similar vintage, is about only as old as Sao Paulo/ex-Foch, and has already been in service for about five years past its expiration date and will probably total close to 15 (they wanted to retire it in '08 and replace it with the ex-Baku/ex-Admiral Gorkhov, but that got delayed). Even our supercarriers even just barely close to that vintage have been retired.

The Essex has other strikes going against it. Now it does have a significant plus, in that aside from the Lexingtons and Charles de Gaulle, it's the largest non-supercarrier design ever, and especially given the large numbers available they did attract foreign interest in the 60s and 80s. But given its 30s-era design lineage and even after three upgrade programs across much of the fleet, they were still manpower-intensive, and so these navies went with the smaller British light carriers or the Independence-class carriers instead. Now the export carrier of choice, so to speak, seems to be the Spanish Juan Carlos class, or better yet you build it yourself to your exact specifications.

Quite interested! Now Iran can fight against with Isreali and Isreal against the Saudi, even with aircrafts from see

Its interesting to see how long some of the wartime acrriers could have served. I wonder how long HMS Victorious would have kept going had she been recomissioned. Could she have gone to the Falklands as a large harrier carrier with a ski jump etc? who knows

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"There was nothing wrong with Titanic when she left the Shipyard" Tim McGarry Belfast Comedian