Malta

HMS Malta was intended to be the first ship of her class of large aircraft carriers. Four ships were ordered in 1943, but changing priorities and wartime experience meant repeated changes to the design. All four ships were cancelled after World War II before they were laid down.

Background

In July 1942, the Royal Navy established a Future Building Commission to consider the fleet's requirements for the remainder of the war. The increasing size of new aircraft and the desire for a larger air group meant that a larger ship was necessary. In October 1943, a closed-hangar design with an armored flight deck was chosen. By April 1944, the design was almost ready for approval, but American experience in the Pacific showed the importance of launching large, coordinated strikes. This needed aircraft to be warmed up in the hangars, which was not possible with the Royal Navy’s current armored carrier designs. A new design was sought, resulting in an ‘open’ single hangar ship without flight deck armor. The armor was on the main deck, below the hangar deck, to protect the citadel. This led to ‘Design X’, which was felt to be too large to dock at several existing bases. Further redesigns resulted in Design ‘X1’ which was 50 feet shorter, and Design ‘Y’ which was 150 feet shorter. In April 1945, Design X1 was picked for further development.

The flight deck was a superstructure, US-style, and the hangar deck and sides below it were armored along the length of the citadel. The island was a split structure to allow the flight-deck expansion joint to move. Unlike previous British carrier designs, efforts were made to prevent the heavy anti-aircraft guns intruding on the flight deck area. The flight deck had four elevators, with two deck-edge elevators allowing aircraft to be rapidly spotted for launch. The carriers were expected to carry more than 90 aircraft, and were intended to have catapults that could launch a 30,000 lb aircraft. They would be fitted with arrestor gear that could safely land aircraft weighing up to 20,000 lbs.

The developed designs came up for approval in late August 1945 – just a fortnight after the end of the war with Japan – at which point the Board postponed further decisions. Although the ships had been ordered in 1943, work had never started, and in April 1944 Vickers had been instructed to not order any more material for their carrier, HMS Gibraltar. Although the Admiralty wanted a large carrier fleet in the post-war Royal Navy, Britain could not afford to build the new ships; indeed, many ships which were under construction at the end of the war had their construction paused or stretched out in order to reduce budget demands. Orders for the four Malta-class ships were cancelled by the end of 1945 with no work done.

Malta-class design

See here for links to Update notes.

• Available for testing by supertesters in the game starting from Update 0.11.7.

• Update 0.11.9:
  • Minor fixes to geometry and textures of the ship.
  • Available for purchase in the Armory for 34,950 doubloons and in the Premium shop on 13 October 2022.
  • Available for purchase in the Armory for 268,000 coal, three weeks after the update released (27 October 2022).
• Update 13.1:
  • Torpedo Bomber torpedo damage increased from 5,933 to 6,533.
  • Number bombs in payload on Dive Bombers decreased from 4 to 3.