Cold Warriors: The Essex Class in the Cold War

The exact opposite. It would increase weight, manning requirements and take up more space. The shielding needed is a huge part of why the Enterprise ballooned up from the 82,000 tons of the Kitty Hawk class to over 93,000 tons despite being roughly the same size.

Doubt the United States would allow Argentinië to oparate a nuclear carrier, even if they could.

So my take is that you might be able to reduce manning by around 100 to 200 sailors. Which helps a wee bit and you can improve habitability and crew accommodation.

What type of SLEP will they get? Any chance of adding a 10 - 15 m plug?

Do you know if the Crusader III could be operated by HMS Hermes at all?

December 2, 1958
Newport News, VA

The future USS America is laid down at Newport News Shipbuilding alongside her sister, Enterprise. She will be the Navy's second nuclear powered carrier. Like her older sister, America is projected to cost roughly three hundred million dollars and is planned to join the fleet in just over three years. As previously planned, America's keel is laid in one of the massive drydocks at Newport News.

December 4, 1958
Port of Tanjung Perak, East Java, Indonesia

The Soviet freighter Admiral Ushakov returns to the Indonesian port to make yet another delivery. Deep in her holds are crates that are labeled as containing additional MiG-15UTI trainers for the Indonesian Air Force. Instead, the crates each hold two AS-1 Kennel Anti-Ship Missiles. A first generation ASM, they are roughly the same shape as the MiG-15 with about the same performance. They are however considerably smaller than the MiG-15, allowing two of them to be carried beneath the wings of Tu-16 bombers. Their biggest selling point though, is that they allow a true stand-off attack to be made from over eighty miles away. This is a vast improvement over trying to dive bomb with tactical aircraft.

The missiles are transported to a hanger at Iswahyudi Airbase at night and over the next few days, several previously delivered MiG-15s are rolled out of the hanger in new markings to further the deception that additional trainers were delivered as attrition replacements. Indonesia's new anti-ship capability was to remain a state secret. For now.

December 18, 1958
Edwards Air Force Base, California, USA

The thunder of the mighty Pratt & Whitney J75 rent the morning air. The Super Crusader prototype was taking to the air for yet another test flight. Behind the hulking fighter a bright cone of flame stretched out as the pilot went to full afterburner for his takeoff run. Leaving the ground behind, the Crusader and its pilot made their way to the Naval Ordnance Test Station China Lake. The Vought engineers had modified the intake ramp yet again in another attempt to eliminate the Crusader's troubling tendency to go into a compressor stall when coming out of burner in supersonic flight. They were trying something that was in all honesty stolen from McDonnell's F4H after one of the engineers had taken a look at it late one night. It was a variable ramp placed in the intake scoop that would disrupt the airflow just enough to regulate the speed at which air could enter the engine. By disrupting the airflow to reduce its speed to subsonic speeds before entering the engine, it was hoped that this would eliminate the vast majority of compressor stalls.

Upon arrival at the Test Station, the test pilot went to burner and quickly pushed the Crusader to Mach 2 before bracing himself for the expected compressor stall and pulling the throttle out of burner and back to military power. As the engine slowed, the expected stall never came. Falling back to a subsonic speed, the pilot pushed his throttle back to full afterburner to repeat the test. This time, he pushed the fighter to mach 2.25 before reducing the throttle to idle. If anything was going to induce a compressor stall, this was it. Instead, the engine continued to roar behind him. He had several more test to run to try and induce a compressor stall, but so far the new ramp seems to have solved the biggest issue facing the Super Crusader.

Two and a half hours later, the hulking brute of a fighter landed back at Edwards Air Force Base and the pilot climbed from the cockpit. He had done everything he could think of to stall the compressor and the redesigned had performed nearly flawlessly. Only once was he able to induce a compressor stall, and that was while doing something that would probably never be done in regular service. He had accelerated to mach 1.8, then cut the throttle to idle and pulled the plane into a high-G climbing turn. The airflow had been so badly disrupted that the both the wing and the compressor had stalled. Thank God he had plenty of altitude below him to recover because he had damn near gone into a flat spin doing that. He'd let the engineers know to make a note in the flight manual never to do that in an operational squadron.