Quote:
Originally Posted by dragoon500ly
Well, the USS Lexington is home ported out of Pensacola, Florida in the pre war era. And she is a flight deck...BUT... she has no aircraft support capabilities or other features that would permit her to operate in a combat role. She has been stripped of all armament and fire control equipment and operates only navigation and a single air search radar. Her magazines have been emptied and filled with concrete ballast. Her port deck-edge elevator has been deactivated and forms a permament part of the flight deck (yes they did weld it in place).
Her sole mission is to serve as a seagoing platform for landings and takeoffs by pilots from the Pensacola flight school, she is reported to maintain some aircraft refueling capability, but this supply does not consist of more than a few thousand gallons, their are no aircraft maintanance facilities operational.
During the Reagan era, the Navy sought to reactivate the Hancock-class carriers. Congress refused to fund this reactivation due to the poor material condition and lack of suitable combat aircraft that can operate from their flight decks (during the Vietnam War the supported F-8/A-4 squadrons, being too small to operate the F-4s). The best material condition of the three Hancocks (Lexington) is operated as a training carrier.
The Lexington would have to be extensively modernized and refitted in order to operate in a combat environment...at best her air group would have to consist of Harriers and helicopters. And in the Twilight War....it is doubtful that this would be done.
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Actually the Lexington, the Wisconsin and her surface action group were all originally supposed to be based at NAVSTA Ingleside at Corpus Christi - the end of the Cold War changed the decision but here that didnt happen.
Thus you would have Lexington, the Wisconsin, a Ticonderoga cruiser, a Kidd destroyer or a Flight I Arleigh Burke destoyer, a Spruance destroyer, three Oliver Hazard Perry frigates and probably a fleet oiler would have been based there.
That happened after the Caribbean module was written meaning that most likely the battleship that took down the Kirov was the Wisconsin and not the New Jersey. By the time Corpus Christi got nuked most likely all those ships would have been on overseas duty - with most of them sunk or damaged already