tal OP , 2 months ago

I’ve toyed with the idea of using huge rotary-wing drones to autonomously lift the aircraft, do launch and recovery. Then you don’t need a runway at all, and a lot of the constraints on the form of an aircraft carrier go away.

The US has been doing work on aerial aircraft carriers recently that can recover UAVs autonomously, so the recovery stuff is already being worked on:

twz.com/…/gremlins-drones-could-be-reloaded-insid…

But if you use a ship as a carrier, then you don’t have the kind of weight and payload limitations that you do with an aircraft.