• @BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Oh man, you all are still thinking these guys have a navy at the same level as some of the top 10, none of the countries here are big enough to worry about a real aircraft carrier. Spain kind of has a singular one with a flight deck that can hold a few harriers, but they classify it as an amphibious assault ship or use it for helicopters. It’s definitely the big ship to worry about in the fleet and Spain has a pretty significant complement of larger ships, but we’re talking frigates, this is not that kind of Navy.

      Beyond some big ships from Spain, think mostly patrol boats and a few submarines.

        • @BarbecueCowboy@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          You either misread a little bit or whatever you were reading wasn’t planning on getting those harriers off the deck. I’m not sure you could physically fit 36 harriers on the deck even if you didn’t have to worry about flying them off/on.

          It can hold a few dozen helicopters, but the space required for helicopters is not interchangeable with the space required for harriers. The aircraft numbers you probably saw is assuming you take up the whole flight deck, no space to take off and land at all, and that is assuming the helicopters are small. You can find details pretty easily online, but just do an image search, it will make it pretty obvious that you are not fitting that many harriers on that boat. They’d have to hang them off the sides.

          This still is probably the ship to watch out for, but comparing it to a real aircraft carrier is rough. Also, if you count this as an aircraft carrier, there’s 11 countries, maybe more depending on how you look at it. Australia has two of these that are the same class but they built and classify them exclusively as helicopter docks and don’t have anything else classified as a carrier.