Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-73.220.89.40-20150318192417/@comment-26574811-20160119150922

CaptainCoxwaggle wrote:

As we see the US carriers of the Yorktown class had a tendency to lose power quickly, which typically sealed their fates, something that only the Enterprise avoided. US however fielded effective damage control that allowed them to control fires, requiring that the IJN sink them with torpedoes to prevent reclamation. The Hiryuu and Souryuu (who I brought in as she is a near sister of Hiryuu) were both likewise reclaimable once the fires died out and had to be scuttled due to Midway being well outside IJN home grounds.

Thus despite having a 30% increase in displacement (and further incerased to 32,000 tons when she was remodelled to have a torpedo blister among other imprvements), the Enterprise provides no significant increase in survivability, the vulnerability of her sisters being an indication that the Enterprises survival is due to good fortune. Her aircraft complement is equal to Hiryuus in terms of size ratio despite US advantages in aviation. And is a slower, less maneaverable ship. Her saving grace was the excellence of US damage control, No, Japanese carrier loses air power even quicker, I've consulted one of the best naval scholars in my country, and he assured me that no other flight deck was as weak as that of a Japanese carrier. Japanese flight decks are guarrenteed to be disabled by just one bomb hit, although in actual combat it is rare that an IJN carrier got hit just once. This is due to the fact that a very large area of the deck would be blasted out of shape, leaving the whole carrier unable for combat.

This also means that for a damaged flight deck, a Japanese one takes a lot longer to repair than carriers from other countries.

Hiryu did not carry 64 planes, she carried 57; a Yorktown class can carry 82~83, not 80.

By the way, from said scholar, American reserve planes were not disassembled, they were just hung mid-air in the hangar, ready to use in combat. So in reality we are talking about 90~100+ aircrafts from Yorktown versus 57 from Hiryu. In other words, from just 30% more displacement, a Yorktown owns nearly double the aviation capability.

I would repeat it again, the grace of damage control includes better damage control designs on the ship. You can't save a ship already done for, no matter how well-trained you are. After USS Yorktown was abandoned, she stayed afloat for another night, something not gonna happen on a Japanese carrier of similar size, and suffering similar damage.