ORIGINAL: Gary Childress
Judging from the feedback I've gotten so far here and from the Warship Projects forums, Scenario # 3 is the best one to go with.
Let's work on that one then. When can I get those 3 extra Yorktowns and at what expense? Could I maybe cancel N. Carolina and Washington to free up some building capacity? Can the US forfeit the London Treaty sooner than 1937 in order to free up tonnage so that Wasp can be built as a Yorktown?
If scenario #3 is the most plausible then lets iron it out.
The Yorktown class was built by Newport News, Yorktown and Enterprise were laid down in 1934 and Hornet in 1939. Wasp was built by Bethlehem Steel Works in 1936. Those two yards also shared the first thirteen Essex class ships.
The driver behind Wasp's design was the attempt to squeeze as much carrier as possible from the 15.000 tons remaining from the London Treaty limits. I'm pretty certain that, if the USA had renounced the London Treaty effective from 1936, Wasp would have emerged as a Yorktown.
I think the only nations keeping to the London Treaty from 1936 onwards were Britain and the USA, so if the USA had wanted to react to developments in Japan, the fallout would merely have been diplomatic trouble with Britain, which could have been ignored. What should Britain have done, impose an economic embargo on the USA when they still hadn't paid off their debts from WW I?
So let's imagine the USA formally renounces all Naval Treaty limitations effective from January 1, 1936, as reaction to Japan. It is decided to build, for a start, four more Yorktown class carriers. As a first step, Wasp is ordered from Bethlehem as a Yorktown, and Hornet from Newport News. Both could have been laid down in 1936, Wasp on the same slip as in RL and Hornet on the slip vacated by the launch of Yorktown in April 1936. The only ship that could have collided with Hornet at the time was CL49 St. Louis which was laid down in December 1936, I assume on the slip vacated in October by Enterprise. There was enough free capacity at the time, as the Navy build-up hadn't yet started in earnest. The budget could probably have been stretched for that. Don't cancel Washington, the US Navy never had a BB class of one.
I'd schedule the next pair for 1938/1939, one for Newport News in place of Hornet, one for Bethlehem Quincy (call it Constellation, or maybe Essex?). Both yards were building BB's from the 1938 budget, Indiana in Newport News, parallel to Hornet, Massachusetts in Quincy, laid down in July 1939. I propose laying down CV10 Constellation in place of Massachusetts, on July 20, 1939, and either delay Massachusetts until after the launch of Constellation (say December 1940, with commissioning in September/October 1941)) cancel it, or move it to another yard: neither New York Navy Yard nor Philadelphia Navy Yard, where it would have collided with the Iowa class ships; New York Shipbuilding was heavily engaged in the cruiser program; I don't know if there was any spare capacity in the Norfolk Navy Yard which was already building Alabama. The only other yard with any battleship experience would have been Mare Island Navy Yard (California and Montana).
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