Japan Unveils Biggest Warship Since WWII

[sofa king]

148. Yes, and not totally unprecedented, either.

Many are aware that Japan built the two largest battleships ever, but there was a third ship of the Yamato class, Shinano, which emerged as the largest aircraft carrier of World War II. It compared rather favorably to the American supercarriers of later decades in the 20th Century, such as the Forrestal (CV-59).

The "battleship" Shinano and the "destroyer" Izumo share nearly the same deck length. Catapults and ski jumps are hardly necessary now that the real fun is going to be in deploying a thousand expendable VTOL drones.

Conversions of one sort of ship into an aircraft carrier were not terribly unusual in World War II and the years prior. The Japanese even created a hybrid battleship-carrier by converting the Ise-class battleships to have main guns up front and a flight deck in back, while the Americans happily slapped flight decks on battlecruisers, cruisers and cargo ships.

Also worthy of note is the fact that the tween-wars Japanese always found a way to bend or break the naval treaties and agreements to which they were nominally bound, particularly when it came to their "destroyers," which were invariably larger and faster than their equivalents in other navies, and sometimes so heavily armed as to be in danger of capsizing in high seas.

It seems to me then that some of the Japanese are not as ignorant of their own history as some of us wish to believe, because what the Japanese are doing here is violently wiggling within the confines of laws they no longer wish to obey, exactly as they did in the interwar years before Pearl Harbor.

You can call this ship a web-footed floating avian, but it's quacking like a duck.