Flattops

The answer may be a return to more numerous and less costly smaller conventionally-powered flattops.

While that would allow the Royal Navy to maintain a powerful airwing on its flattops, it would deprive the RAF of aircraft to carry out its own missions.

Neither submarine was able to find the enemy flattops.

The dive-bombers were not the first American carrier-based planes to attack the enemy flattops.

Though the U.S. was over a year away from involvement in World War II, naval engineers grasped the qualities a fully-capable carrier needed: when it came to ‘flattops’, bigger was actually better.

When the Soviets introduced their own small aircraft carriers in the mid-1970s, British and American subs no doubt watched them as closely as Soviet undersea boats followed NATO flattops.

While dual nose wheels are not exclusively reserved for aircraft carrier jets, they do provide an advantage, as landing on flattops—especially with weapons attached and/or a heavy fuel load—is taxing on an airframe.

To prepare its submarines to hunt and sink American aircraft carriers in some future World War III, during the Cold War the Soviet navy ordered its hundreds of sub captains to get as close as possible to U.S. flattops … and stay there.