Aircraft Carrier (Civ6)/Civilopedia

It was likely inevitable that someone would have the insane idea of flinging an airplane off a moving ship at sea. That someone was Commander Charles Samson of the British Royal Navy in 1912 AD from the deck of the HMS Hibernia, following the example of the American Eugene Ely, who had been the first to takeoff from a stationary ship (USS Birmingham in 1910) and later land on one (USS Pennsylvania in 1911). Then, despite the nay-sayers, came the HMS Ark Royal, originally laid down as a merchant ship but converted to a “flat-top” for launching planes; she was commissioned in September 1914, just in time to serve throughout WW1. By the late 1930s, various navies – notably the Japanese and the American – had designed large aircraft carriers, meant to bring airpower to bear across the expanses of the Pacific against those behemoth battleships that ruled the waves. Soon enough, they issued in the end of the battleship, commencing with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. These days, naval task forces are centered on the carriers, with every other ship dancing to their tune.