Both the carrier designs seems to go for huge deck space which is a good thing from a safety point of view and obviously you can handle a large number of aircraft as well.
Having lots of deck space is critical to fast operations. Those deck lifts are slow and relatively inefficient, so most of the time the aircraft will spend most of their time on deck... making more space in the hangar for repairs and other work.
Obviously except if there is a storm brewing, but you generally try to sail around those when you can.
The F-14D was a very good upgrade indeed but appropriately named Dick Cheney killed the program at around 60 air frames.
The F-14D had excellent engines that were as powerful in 100% dry thrust as the engines from the F-14A model were in full AB... which meant the F-14D could take off in dry thrust safely, or in full AB with a better safety margin at heavier weights.
Personally I would prefer UAV's to perform AWACS and other recce roles with real time data and video links to the task force instead of heavy manned aircraft - but yes the jet engine variant is quite interesting.
There is no operational UAV AWACS platform anywhere, so if you are going for systems that don't exist then I would go for an airship based AWACS platform.
It could be designed in the shape of a big flat wing with the upper surface covered in solar panels but made strong enough for UAVS to land and take off from its upper surface like a flying aircraft carrier.
An Airship could be 100m long so the radar antenna arrays it could carry in 3 or four different frequency ranges could be enormous... and the heat generated with them running would add lift to the entire aircraft too.
ULF radio or ultra low frequency radio requires a cable several kms long but works best when hung vertically... they could hang several from an airship to communicate with submarines deep under water... the Tu-142 has a similar antenna but has to fly dangerously slow.... close to its stall speed to get the antenna vertical enough to be useful... and airship would have no problems in that regard.
The airship could be made of modern fire proof materials that are light and strong and not flammable, the inner volume could be purged with nitrogen so if you hit the airship with a missile and it penetrated deep into the centre of the airship and released flares or flammable material they would not keep burning because there would only be hydrogen and nitrogen.
In fact it would probably take multiple hits to do enough damage to make the airship descend.
The airship could be designed to sit on the water.
You could have different sized models that include some that can be tethered to smaller ships like corvettes... say with a 30m long antenna and electric propulsion motors for station keeping... it could deliver the radar data directly via the tether and be powered from the ship... they could operate 24/7.
In case of storms the carrier size airship could simply climb above the weather.
With modern hydrogen fuel cells you have an easy way to convert lifting gas to ballast and back again with solar panels as one source of power and of course batteries and even a small gas turbine could be mounted... even a nuclear battery as used in satellites.
The radar antenna could be enormous, the operational capacity could be months or years at a time, you could have multiple radar array types including very large and bulky long wave radar arrays as part of the airships structure.
It would not be particularly fast but it only has to keep pace with the carrier group.
You could operate high altitude UAVS off its back and you could mount weapons to defend the airship from attack.
In fact you could change altitude to catch the trade winds to relocate to another place quite quickly if need be.
Speed is not so critical for AWACS platforms as radar size, and altitude and endurance... and in those areas an airship cannot be beaten... even a satellite cannot carry as large and as many different types of radar antenna as an airship which could be huge.
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