Which Mod to upgrade carriers!?

[Keldysh]

At this moment I run 'Air deck operations upgrade' installed which is incompatible to the '[Carrier Name] Full Capability Mods'.

As you can only have one or the other and my experience with the game is very limited as I just recently got the game I would like to know which of the mods benefit the game more.

I've read that 'Air deck operations upgrade' is helpful to make flight operations work better, but I don't know if the other mods would do the same or better and/or provide more functionality.

[Julhelm]

Air deck operations upgrade has been merged into the vanilla game to a large extent. The vanilla carriers are balanced for fun and realism. Any mod that removes the parked aircraft and lets you operate 4 elevators at once is inherently unrealistic.

[Keldysh]

Ok, so what you say is that under normal circumstances (and in reality) some elevators are blocked as they are used for parking planes on the flight deck, right?

[SSG Beard [506 IR]]

There's still a bit of a grey area around deck operations with carriers. Peace time operations definitely separate the launching and recovery of aircraft for safety but all current US carriers have a catapult and elevator layout that is intentionally designed to allow 4 cats to be used when not recovering aircraft (they cannot be used simultaneously because the nuclear kettles need a moment to generate that much steam) but they can be operated extremely rapidly. This allows the maximum number of aircraft to be launched when the fleet is being attacked. When recovering aircraft, the bow catapults and starboard lifts can still be used. That is the whole purpose behind the invention of the angled flight deck. Straight deck carriers in WW2 could not launch and recover aircraft at the same time which was a significant limitation.

Given that Sea Power is a combat simulation, I personally prefer the additional realism of having full capability carriers. At the same time, from the perspective of the people making the came playable and somewhat 'fair,' American carriers in game and IRL are the absolute definition of OP. I am Australian and the entire combat power of the Royal Australian Air Force can be put on board one Nimitz class ship. There are 11 supercarriers. Each one with whole nation's worth of airpower on board. I totally understand why the devs are tying a hand behind their backs!

The other reason for slowing down the cycle rate is because it is not practical to simulate maintenance availability. At this time, there is no modelling of damaged aircraft that need time to be repaired, refueled and rearmed. If a carrier and crew have all new shiny stuff and have a good couple of days warning before kicking off WW3, of course they can launch the entire air wing in 1/2 an hour or so. But that is very unrealistic. Flight operations begin when they leave port and continue almost all the time. Sustained operations are done with equipment that has to be constantly maintained by people who are very tired.

It's a really, really complicated topic and impossible to accurately simulate on a computer game. Personally, I think the dev's have balanced it fairly well.