>What that means is that the aviation cruiser and aviation battleship,
>concepts that never really worked in the real world - warships with
>heavily armed gun turrets forward of the superstructure and a
>miniature flight deck aft, like the Ise class - suddenly become
>not only viable, but potentially really significant weapons. They
>never really worked in real life because they either had to carry
>float planes, which can't compete with anything that has retractable
>gear in aerial combat, or else could only launch their normal
>aircraft, not recover them. They were a classic example of a Swiss
>army knife with too many blades.
>
>Replace those bulky, cumbersome, unrecoverable aircraft with Striker
>Units, though, and you have a ship that actually can function
>as a battleship and a full-service carrier. They could station the
>equivalent of an entire JFW aboard such a vessel easily, which is a
>big stick indeed in a world where conventional naval firepower is
>virtually useless by itself. (They never did anything much with the
>obvious possibility of naval gunfire supporting witch operations,
>unfortunately. In the anime, with only one exception I can think of,
>whenever warships appear, it's just to blunder around and accomplish
>fuckall until the witches show up and do all the actual work.
>Combined arms isn't really something the writers were interested in
>exploring, I guess. :)

Thing is, I imagine that just as in the real world, such designs would be a case of wartime expedience (getting more witches in the existing fleet) than a long-term plan. If striker units are given to the same sort of size growth that their real world counterparts were, then even the Yamato will eventually have space issues. To give you some idea of what I mean, I present Cpt. Patricia "Patty" Mitchell (Callsign: "Maverick") in her F-14D striker unit.