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Post by Noname117 on Dec 19, 2016 11:43:50 GMT -6
First thing first: select 1 cruiser as a leader. Put that cruiser in whatever role you want, support, independent, scout, or whatever.
Then select the light cruiser you would like to form up behind it. Set its role to "core," and set it to follow the cruiser you set as your lead.
Then select the light cruiser you would like to be third in your line. Set its role to "core," and have it follow the cruiser second in line.
And so on and so on.
I believe the role of "core" means to follow the division it is set to lead on. The role of independent means that the ships will do what they want. Scouts scout, and I'm not quite sure what the specifics of screen and support are (I think this information is correct or correct enough to use).
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 13, 2016 15:27:50 GMT -6
Listing from battle damage/flooding would be a great addition. Listing is simulated in that ROF will be reduced if a ship has a lot of flotation damage. Well, to be fair, listing probably effects the range of the guns a bit. I remember hearing that USS Texas was actually given a list purposefully shortly after D-Day so her guns could provide longer ranged fire against German ground targets (Or was it Arkansas or Nevada... hmm...) In ship to ship battles I would assume that list would shorten the range of the guns to one side of the ship while increasing it on the other side; unless the list is strong enough that firing the guns poses a risk of capsizing the ship. Just assumptions though, don't actually know too much about what would happen in real life. Or if anything like this is already in the game.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 13, 2016 11:51:07 GMT -6
The sad fact is that there is nothing a modern battleship couldn't do that other platforms can't do more efficiently or better. For sea-denial, submarines. For sea-control, planes and a few small escort-type craft. For shore bombardment, planes and missiles. Shore bombardment by guns is better, cheaper and more efficient, but keeping a specialized ship around for that is not. The US Navy could have pulled the turrets out of a South Dakota-class BB or a Des Moines-class CA and put one in a shore bombardment ship. They didn't - and have resisted all calls to put 8" or larger weapons on cruisers and destroyers - and they have good reasons not to. I think the only reason we still use carriers is because there hasn't been a major naval war in seventy years. Modern intelligence (from satellites, planes, sonobuoys etc) makes it hard to hide a sub and almost impossible to hide a surface ship. And, frankly, the truth has always been that if you could see it you can attack it. Modern aircraft and missiles have very long range and have high destructive power. Modern ships may have jamming and 20mm autocannon, but I think the truth is that an attack in sufficient numbers would wreck even a carrier task force. Carriers are floating gasoline barges with bombs piled on top; one good hit and you have mission-killed it if not sunk it. Carriers are very useful in peacetime and for little wars; come a new world war they'd go the way of the battleship. Too expensive; too fragile. Look at the Falklands War. I tip my hat to the bravery and resourcefulness of the Royal Navy, but if the Argentines had had a couple of dozen Exocets in their inventory instead of just a couple, the Royal Navy might have been forced to pull back out of air-attack range. So - no. The battleship is gone. Its day ended when a weapons system was developed to deliver ordinance at greater ranges than a battleship's big guns could reach (aircraft). Nowadays, surface ships are easy kills, submarines are getting easier to find and manned aircraft may be on the way out in the near future. Battleships have no mission - ergo no battleships. The thing I think people are ignoring here is that surface ships are likely to become harder kills. CIWS is only going to improve in accuracy and ability, especially with lasers on the way, and then we may wind up with a situation where firing non-nuclear missiles at a fleet is pointless, as all incoming missiles can be shot down. Aircraft would likely heavily suffer as well, since they could be shot down by such defensive systems as well, unless they fire long range missiles, which would be pointless to do in this scenario. Submarines usually carry 2 types of weapons nowadays: Missiles and torpedoes. In the scenario I'm describing missiles would be pointless and thus the sub is left with just the torpedo as an option. A sub is probably going to have to approach decently close to a fleet to fire torpedoes at it (in comparison to missiles and guns), and if subs are getting easier to spot doing so is just going to become harder and harder over the years in this scenario. At the same time, a gun produced today would be far longer ranged and far more accurate than a gun produced in the late 1940s (really the end of the all-gun-armed-ship-era). If the projectiles they fire aren't easily shot down by CIWS or other defense systems, then gunfire might become the only conventional way to have a naval unit attack another naval unit and do damage. That being said, now that I think about it perhaps the laser could become the weapon choice of the future. You wouldn't be able to shoot one beyond the horizon at something, but if you had direct line of sight at an enemy ship they couldn't avoid being hit. And since they'd operate as good defensive systems too there's not really much else one could fire at a ship to destroy it. Perhaps symmetrical naval warfare will be made obsolete by satellite-mounted laser weapons, or maybe there would be fights between laser armed ships and laser armed satellites. Anyways, overall I don't think the battleship is dead. I think it is in a coma on life support with a low but not insignificant chance of waking up in a few dozen years, but if it doesn't wake up then the plug will have to be pulled. And even if it does come back it definitely won't be the same as before (Ok, this isn't the perfect analogy, since it implies that the battleship [and gun armed cruiser] wouldn't have been dead for many of the years where there were none in service, so maybe the analogy is more directed at the possibility of a comeback of large primarily gun-based ships rather than there being any in service themselves).
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 12, 2016 15:06:50 GMT -6
Well, I look to have been absent from a very good discussion here for the last few days - lots of interesting thoughts, and thanks all for input My quick two cents on top of what's already been mentioned (my answer, by the way, was "why would we?": One other way to think about this issue is to ask "what are the fleet roles a ship could be filling?" and "are there types of ship that fill this role best?", followed by considering whether something battleship-like would be optimal for it. For my own conclusions, looking at traditional roles of battleships, here's what I get: Sea control - no, because while the battleship is a potent platform for it, it would be perhaps the least economical option. (Arguably, while carriers today are also often placed in this role they are nearly as unsuited). The point can be made here is that much of the battleship's weight, cost and complexity comes from its gun armament, and as a ship-to-ship weapon, the big gun is obsolete. Commerce raiding - definitely no. Traditional line-of-battle role - does not exist in the modern world, and is never going to again. A group of ships in close formation is a dream tactical nuke target. A ship designed to absorb damage in a running fight is also no longer viable. I would make the argument that despite the unlikelihood of them actually being used, nuclear anti-ship missiles should be a baseline threat considered for any ship-to-ship combat scenario - even from the perspective that a ship's defensive tactics should be fundamentally based on avoiding hits in the first place. The battleship was originally a ship very much designed to absorb hits from even the strongest weapons of the prospective enemy, but in the modern battlefield, this is no longer possible to guarantee. "Gunboat diplomacy" - some merit here, but arguably carriers and LHAs are much better platforms for it, especially when you add things like natural disaster relief to the scope of this role. Some of this would depend on propaganda effectiveness too: it's interesting, for example, that even though Russia and China both have some potent surface and sub-surface combatants that are real lethal threats, it is the movements of their barely-functioning and obsolete carriers that get press. Arguably, with enough spin, a battleship could be seen the same way. On the other hand, building an extremely expensive warship for a diplomatic role above all else is pretty questionable... Shore bombardment - here is one where a "future battleship" maybe has the most viability. While a great deal has been made of possible replacement platforms, railguns, upgunned destroyers and rocket-boosted, "smart" shells - those have not yet come to a lot of fruition. While in striking pinpoint strategic targets, cruise missiles will continue to dominate, in tactical fire support where volume of persistent fire counts, the big gun is yet to be definitively replaced. If we assume that an effective shore bombardment ship is not just a monitor with no other capabilties, but a long-range, ocean-going combat platform - then maybe a battleship-of-sorts has merit. It would not, however, be a battleship in the traditional sense. I'd argue that "big gun" when it comes to shore bombardment would likely mean an 8" battery at most. It'd be a smaller ship, more of a heavy cruiser - and all the more so in terms of protection, because there's little sense in armor in the modern combat environment, and that weight is far better spent on active defenses instead. From there, I think such a ship could grow some secondary capabilities - as a cruise missile carrier, an AA ship, a ship-to-ship combatant, a helicopter carrier, or maybe most promising of all an amphibious assault ship. That role would combine most naturally with shore bombardment - this gun-toting ship could land Marines and then continue to support them with not just aviation but also organic artillery. It would also justify something approximately battleship-sized. I believe there was a project like that for the Iowas back in the 70s... For me, though, the bottom line is that a ship design shouldn't start with taking a pre-existing concept (i.e. "a battleship") and trying to shoehorn it into an operational role, but vice versa: you start with a role (or multiple roles) and you design a ship to fit that role. I think the traditional battleship role is long-dead and not coming back, but maybe there's still some life in big-gun ships. I wouldn't bet too much on it however, especially as we're already approaching a point where I think true carriers are heading to the same historical dustbin... The one thing I will say to this is that with long range guns and guided shells, if missiles and aircraft become obsolete for attacking ships because of active defenses and bullets somehow don't, the big gun as an anti-ship weapon might have some merit. In most other scenarios the battleship will remain obsolete
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 11, 2016 9:39:45 GMT -6
Here's my recipe: Plan on building 2 minesweepers and two destroyers per month. Put twice as many ships on ASW as required. Plan on having 1 BB/BC damaged per month. If more than 1 BB/BC is sunk per month, reload. This means you will have to reload fairly often, but the alternative is to see your fleet lose BB/BC at an insane rate and find yourself without a battle-line. I remember only a few BBs lost to subs and mines in 4 years of WW1 - Audacious, Danton, Viribus Unitis, Szent Istvan. My fleet has lost that many in four months, and that's with double the required number of DDs and minesweepers on ASW work. Of all the ships you listed, only Audacious should count. Danton was not a dreadnought, and thus would be considered a B in game terms. Viribus Unitis was sunk from limpet mines placed by frogmen; essentially sabotage rather than proper mine warfare. And Szent Istvan was sunk because of motor torpedo boats. However, during WWI the losses of pre-dreadnoughts to mines and submarines was quite high. In addition to Danton, HMS Irresistible, HMS Ocean, Bouvet, HMS Formidable, HMS Triumph, HMS Majestic, Barbaros Hayreddin, HMS King Edward VII, HMS Russel, Suffren, Gaulois, HMS Cornwallis, and HMS Brittania were all lost to mines or submarines (Though I believe shore batteries contributed to a couple of them sinking as well).
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 9, 2016 10:32:42 GMT -6
I feel like cruiser actions and blockades are going to be the norm here. I bet you're going to try avoiding fleet actions at all costs unless you have a massive destroyer advantage...
Now I wonder if you should maybe focus on building torpedo armed ships and trying to intermix you fleet with the enemy's
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 9, 2016 10:01:27 GMT -6
You know, your comment just made me change my mind again. Battleships, or at least unarmored battlecruisers, have a significant chance of coming back in the future. If those ships carry no armor, they won't be battleships. The mere definition of battleship is that of an armored ship. If you don't clad it in armor then it won't be one. What you're describing is a big size naval combatant unit. I would struggle to call it a battlecruiser either (battlecruiser is the definition of a ship that sacrifized armor or weapons for speed, neither would be the case), but at any rate it would be no battleship. And yeah, I certainly can see a future for such a warship. Even while I still think a bigger number of smaller ships is always better than a smaller number of bigger ships. Redundancy, ability to soak losses without losing too much fighting power, and dispersion of assets through a larger array of targets IMO is a much more sensible doctrine than the concentration of a lot of power in a few larger combatants. But hey, that's open to discussion. Well, in the modern environment, I'm pretty certain they'd be called either battleships or battlecruisers. Do remember that a "frigate" to someone living in the 1930s would've been an old sailing vessel from 70 years beforehand. Although a new battleship or battlecruiser wouldn't have much armor it would still likely have large amounts of active defenses replacing said armor. Which might mean that a new battleship would have large amounts of active defenses while a new battlecruiser would have less active defenses, since that is effectively the armor of the ship now. A bit confusing to explain, but I do think that the ship I described is just battleships and battlecruisers coming back in a new, updated fashion rather than an entirely new class of ship entirely. Same in spirit, just with modern design principles.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 9, 2016 6:36:22 GMT -6
so the issues are 1. armor ineffective compared to some missiles 2. anti torpedo systems not good enough to absorb torpedo damage 3. no counter to subs 4. no counter to torpedos 5. no counter to missiles (other than ciws,anti missile missiles,and flares ) 6. costs of manpower and machinery 7.larger target than dd's c's and light cv's 8. vulnerable optical and radar systems 9. need advanced propulsion/ power generation systems to keep up with modern ships 10. sustained damage to unarmored areas makes armor useless 1. Armor ineffective, period. In a massive 60k battleship you can only hope to properly armor the machinery areas, the magazine spaces, the command spaces, and the main battery. That's less than 40% of the volume of a big warship. Anything out of that space is going to get reduced to shreds by virtually anything that impacts it, as in the best cases what's there is splinter armor, if any. And there's plenty of stuff out of that volume that if you get knocked off, your big unit becomes useless in battle. 2- Correct 3- Arguably you can put a battleship in a task force with dedicated ASW escorts. I don't see a huge problem with this, carriers are also unable to counter subs (their aircraft can, but the ship itself doesn't) and is not that big of a deal 4- Correct, but this is not privative to battleships. No modern warship can take a modern antisurface torpedo and remain operational. It'll be disabled in the best case, sunk in the worst, but again that's not particular to the battleships. 5- WEll you can fit a large ECM suite to that battleship. The problem is that, as everything else that the battleship needs to be battleworthy, that ECM suite will have to be outside of the main armored box, and prone to be destroyed. 6- Correct. For what it offers a battleship is absurdly expensive to build and maintain. 7- Again size is a drawback but if you compensate it with other strenghts, it can be worth it. Carriers are immense and obviously they're tremendously important ships...but that's because they offer something in exchange. Battleships don't. So in their case the drawback of being huge has no benefit to compensate for it. So, correct. 8-Let's see the problem is not that those electronics and optics are vulnerable to damage. Because that's the case on every other ship in the fleet. The problem is that you're building and paying an insane cost for a ship supposedly able to survive massed damage. Which probably they will (survive it), but will be useless even if it does. So you're essentially paying a huge premium extra cost for an enormous ammount of armor that's going to guarantee that...if the ship gets hit in battle it'll remain afloat, but unable to fight. Why that extra cost then?. What do you want an useless floating hulk for?. 9- Nah, I don't see it as a big problem. It's obviously going to be costly to build the machinery for such a ship, but no more costly than it'd be to build any other big fleet unit. You might even make it nuclear if you want to. The problem is not that the propulsion is expensive, the problem is that the unit supposed to carry it makes no sense in a modern battlefield. 10- Correct, and that pretty much sums it up. To begin with nowadays I truly doubt wether building a battleship is possible. Well it would be after a huge investment in industrial assets, but there's been no demand of the huge plates of neither face-hardened nor rolled homogeneous armor that a battleship demands. The last battleship completed in the US was USS Missouri, and it's been almost 73 years since that. Since that point the US Navy (nor any other customer, really) has had no need for massive plates of armor a dozen inches thick. Naturally the industrial base to build those massive plates is long, long gone, and would take a huge investment to bring it back. And no, before anything mentions it, tank plate armour is far from as complex to build as the huge plates needed for a battleship, so that doesn't count. Similarly the main weapons...those kind of calibers haven't been built since 70 years ago. I mean, is not that we don't know how to build them, but you need pretty specialized tooling and steelworks to build that kind of stuff. historically the parts of a battleship that took the longest to build were, precisely, the main guns and turrets. Lots of battleships were delayed because their weapons were taking too long to build. And that was in the battleship heyday where the infrastructure was there. It's not there anylonger, you'd need to build up from the ground up, and that's neither easy nor cheap. And even if those infrastructures existed, and you could order 30.000 tons of plate armour in thicknesses varying from 4 to 12.5 inches (and in face-hardened and homogeneous variants) tomorrow, that armor makes no sense at all. You'd be building a ship that ,de facto, doesn't offer more survability than any other large non-armored unit. Sure, your armored warship won't sink as easily, but it'll be as easy to remove as an useful battle asset as any large non-armored unit via a soft kill. You'd be paying a huge premium for the ability of a ship to survive as a burning useless hulk, instead of sinking outright. That's not worth the massive cost...and that'd be if those industrial infrastructures were in place. They are not. So you'd have to pay an insane ammount of money only to kickstart that industry before you're even allowed to waste an insane ammount of money in useless armor for a wasteful warship. Long story short: Battleships are gone. For good. And they aint' coming back. You know, your comment just made me change my mind again. Battleships, or at least unarmored battlecruisers, have a significant chance of coming back in the future. When will they? When they can provide more to a naval battle than an aircraft carrier of equal cost. CIWS and anti-aircraft systems would have to be good enough to make a warship of significant size nearly immune to missiles and aircraft while simultaneously not making a ship immune to gunfire. You would need to surround the ships with ASW escorts to protect the battlecruiser from torpedoes. And I think technology evolving in this way is indeed plausible. One of these future battleships or battlecruisers would probably be armed with long range high elevation guns with guided projectiles capable of hitting targets beyond the horizon spotted by a scout of some sort. Said ship could either attack other surface ships at large ranges or be used as artillery in support of land forces. Said ship might be fitted with armor, the point of the armor being to withstand gun-based projectiles fired from other ships, and not missiles, bombs, or torpedoes. EDIT: And now I have another idea of the way things could go if missiles and aircraft attacks against ships become obsolete from CIWS and improved radar and AA guns and subs can still be soft-countered by ASW ships. There would be 2 phases of attack. The first phase would consist of softening up the AA and CIWS defences of the enemy, probably using gunfire or lasers. The second phase would involve a missile or aircraft strike to mission-kill or sink the ship or ships.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 8, 2016 16:38:16 GMT -6
So now this makes sense to me. The carrier killed the battleship. The nuclear submarine kept it dead. Even if you can make a ship effectively immune from aircraft and missiles submarine launched torpedoes can still easily sink it. The only role the surface fleet has is then to provide mobile support for ground forces, which the carrier can do much more effectively than the battleship. Then you need destroyers and/or frigates to protect from submarines and provide additional protection from air threats and Bam! You have your surface fleet.
Thinking about it now, battleships could only make a return if: A: Technology is developed to stop submarine launched weapons from being effective B: Ground based anti-air and anti-missile systems become advanced enough to make potential ground targets immune from carrier or destroyer attack.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 8, 2016 8:52:23 GMT -6
You've got the cart before the horse. You should be asking what a BB would bring to modern naval warfare that would make sense to build one again. About the only thing argued they'd be relevant for is NGFS and it has been strongly argued that that is nothing a 155mm gun couldn't be as good, if not better in more numbers that hearkens back to the fact that the most effective NGFS platforms in WWII were the 5 and 6 inch armed destroyers and cruisers that could provide high volume support. So again - what would a BB do in today's climate? The only reason, again, the only reason the Iowa's were reactivated in the 80s was because the USN needed as many Tomahawk platforms as they could get and slapping them onto the Iowa's was a quick way to getting many to sea with little cost spent (getting four extra flagships kicking around was helpful as well). A BB is defined by it's big guns, which in today's world a limited in range, their size is now overkill and the ships themselves would need AA and ASW protection outside of the abilities they bring to the table. There is a reason why carriers replaced them, the carriers payload could be delivered beyond the horizon and done so with a human mind guiding it. While I will say that I don't think a BB would be particularly effective in today's climate, if you're looking 10 or 20 or 30 years in the future they might start to look favorable again. The primary reasons for this is guns becoming longer ranged (The Zumwalt class can fire almost 3 times as far as the Iowas if they got their proper ammo) and more accurate while countermeasures against missiles and aircraft become more effective (Laser CIWS anyone?). In the near future it might be that ships can be built to be nearly immune from missile and aircraft attack, which would likely make the gun the preferred surface combat weapon again. And if that happens, well, armor might follow, and you have the perfect recipe for battleships once more. And do remember that the Zumwalts armed with just 2 of the 155m advanced gun systems are heavier than most pre-dreadnoughts. A cruiser armed with WWII amounts of those guns would probably be getting into proper battleship displacement.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 7, 2016 11:36:48 GMT -6
ERA regarding armored vehicle defense stands for Explosive Reactive Armor. Not really a practical idea for coating the side of something the size of a warship or considering the size difference between a HEAT round and an anti-ship missile. I meant a anti missile system that does to missiles what ERA has done to HEAT, ie made firing it at a vehicle fitted with significant amounts of it pointless. With the exception to RPGs which are troop carried, HEAT is not fired at MBTs anymore do too a serious effectiveness drop off caused by modern counter measures I still think that this "ERA to missiles," if it ever comes about, would be more effective CIWS. Probably of the laser type.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 7, 2016 8:39:55 GMT -6
I agree with the earlier post about counter measures, so if someone developed the ship equivalent of ERA (on tanks to negate HEAT) for missiles then we may see the return of the big ship with a relatively heavy gun armament. Note the relatively, in that # of guns and size will be reduced I feel due to radar guidance and shell tech. I however feel they will not be the same size as the modern capital ship (carriers) due to cost. Tho I find it extremely funny to note that modern cruisers and some "destroyers" are already bigger than a lot of battleships that were made. Side note can anyone imagine what a modern AMC would look like with the size of both merchant ships and cruise liners nowadays? Well, the "ERA" for missiles is probably just better CIWS systems which can destroy missiles further out and more accurately. I'd say feasible.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 7, 2016 7:34:59 GMT -6
So overall I guess my opinion is that if the technological development trends go in a certain way, which the chance for is significant, we could see a return to battleships. And if they go other ways I think the battleship will be dead for awhile. It's very hard to make predictions, especially about the future. Indeed. The exact reason why I answered "maybe." Things must happen in a certain way for us to see battleships being built again. If things happen in a different way we'll continue to see the same concepts of modern ships go on and on. Things could happen in another way resulting in carriers becoming completely obsolete. Drones could replace piloted aircraft and cause a shift in how aircraft carriers are built. Or maybe the risks of having your drones hacked or disabled becomes so great that piloted aircraft remain the way to go. We can't predict it so we can only look at what we have developed today and what could be developed from the stuff we have today. Although I don't think a return to battleships is likely, I do think the chance of a return is significant.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 7, 2016 7:16:53 GMT -6
I will say I don't see heavily armored ships armed with 11 to 18 inch guns returning, but I could perhaps see large gun-armed cruisers of similar size to battleships being built in the near-ish future. The range and accuracy of cannons is increasing while missiles and aircraft have to cope with CIWS.
If development of missile, aircraft, and drone countermeasure systems exceeds missile, aircraft, and drone development, which it very well might, I think we'll see a return to gun-based ships. And thinking about it now, assuming gun-based countermeasures don't outpace gun development, armor might become important again, which in turn would make more damaging guns necessary, and then suddenly we'd have battleships again.
So overall I guess my opinion is that if the technological development trends go in a certain way, which the chance for is significant, we could see a return to battleships. And if they go other ways I think the battleship will be dead for awhile.
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Post by Noname117 on Dec 5, 2016 18:53:14 GMT -6
Keep in mind only three nations had the capability and requirements to build carriers but that doesn't mean other nations couldn't or shouldn't. Well, technically 5 nations did build aircraft carriers, its just that only 3 completed their designs, and much earlier before the other 2 started trying to build aircraft carriers. I am of course talking about Germany and Italy, both of which nearly completed their own aircraft carrier but never got them into service.
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