Better men than you and me thought it through.

 

The CATOBAR monohull and the STVOTL monohull emerged as the best plane solutions for good reason.

 

Herald

 

 

Consider the Kaimalino bay. A fairly new ship using a swath type hull can land a helo on its deck at up to 25 knots. make a lot bigger ship, longer, give it arrester gear, and you have a high speed, high stability carrier.

TriMaran carriers make nice concept art (See Below)but unfortunately the laws of Hydrodynamics, Physics etc seem to keep getting in the way.  Pretty much every Naval Architecture Degree program has someone who does a large trimaran hull type vessel as their final year major project be it as a bulk carrier, container vessel of aircraft carrier and they always come to the same conclusion.  Technically feasable but why bother when current large monohulls are perfectly suitable.  any advantages in speed are outweighed by the complexity of build and cost.http://navy-matters.beedall.com/cvfimages/cvf-tri.jpg" width=300 border=0>  http://navy-matters.beedall.com/cvfimages/stac201.jpg" width=390 border=0>

Just sort of an historical reality check -

When I was in the USN catamarans were for a few wierdo sailors in the south Pacific.

Now cats are all over the place in civilian applications.  We have them as commuter boats in Bahstan Harbor, as whal watch boats and as commuter boats between Maine and Nova Scotia.

Time has  way of turning the impossible into the obvious. 

Much appreciated, the benefits, like huge deck area, with some work outweigh the costs

I got the idea from Hugin 2, so blame him. Use a trimaran hull, with the outboard hulls being set forward. THe hull should allow a higher speed while stable. It would be equipped with two flight decks, diverging from the stern. Elevators would be mounted midships between the catapults. The island would also be mounted on the centreline.

Not really an aircraft carrier, but check out this proposal:

 

Trimaran, 6 Hercs, huge, nuclear propulsion optional..........interesting!

I can't help thinking that one advantage to a trimaran is that the outrigger hulls would help protect the main hull from attacks comming from the beam, whether AShM or torpedos.

The advantage of a multi-hull goes down as the ship gets bigger.  The fast ferries are being driven way beyond the waterline speed of a 300 ft vessel, but the cat design allows for hulls with length to beam ratios as high as 15:1, which essentially bypasses the effects of the waterline speed.  That's why rowing shells are so obscenely skinny.  A 1,000 ft carrier has a pretty high waterline speed, but it's too late and I'm too tired to look up the equation.  If you build a cat or tri with short fat hulls to carry all the stuff you've inefficiently piled on top, you've lost the advantage of the multi-hulls.  Plus, multi-hulls ride poorly.  They don't ballast and consequently tend to ride on top of the swells, where a heavy ballasted displacement hull tends to damp the surface swells.  Economy of scale benefits monohull.