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The Iowas in My opinion are still unmatched in their construction. Aircraft carriers are too big with too little Protection (see U.S./U.K. Aircraft Carrier Armor during WW2) Same thing with the Cruisers and Destroyers today. Alot of firepower, not enough armor.

I have Seen the Iowa up close and personal, she is truly a sight to behold.

I still contend they had alife in the U.S. Navy, but penny pincher did them in (don't they always)

Never the less they are still among the Best Capital Ships ever to have graced the seas.

Aircraft carriers are too big with too little Protection (see U.S./U.K. Aircraft Carrier Armor during WW2)

The USN went to armored decks with the Midway class and has never looked back. For survivability (by which I mean sinking - the standards for rendering a ship combat-ineffective are different), one only needs to look at the Vietnam-era conflagrations aboard Forrestal and Enterprise to gain a good understanding of what kind of punishment these ships can take. A few years back the USN spent 4 weeks putting every type of weapon in its arsenal, short of nukes, into the hide of the old ex-USS America ... and it still took a deliberate scuttling to put her under.

One of the big lessons of WWII, and particularly early-WWII, was that carriers were incredibly survivable. Specifically Yorktown and Hornet, which showed (in their stubborn and prolonged refusal to sink despite massive damage) the benefits of a high degree of compartmentalization and the maintenance of significant reserve buoyancy.

As an aside, years ago I worked with a guy who was a sailor on the Franklin Delano Roosevelt (the second Midway-class carrier) during her final deployment. He went into great detail about what a complete sh*thole she was -- that her hull was so warped that her compartments didn't line up properly anymore. As it turns out, I learned sometime later that was a damage-protection FEATURE of the Midway-class; the compartments were designed NOT to line up so that she could absorb more punishment.