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“Pardon my ignorance but what’s the diff between a fixed wing carrier and other?”

A quick history lesson on Naval classification.

The US Navy started numbering ships by type around the turn of the 20th century. The first letter indicated the type of ship. Originally “B” was for battleships, “C” was for cruisers, “A” was for auxiliaries, and “D” was for destroyer. The second letter indicated the a subtype. For battleships, there were just battleships, so they repeated the first letter — “BB.”

There were two types of cruisers originally, armored and light — those were designated CA and CL. (After the 1920s Naval limitations treaty the armored cruiser went away, and cruisers were categorized by the size of their main battery — greater than 7” was a “heavy” cruiser, less than 7” was a “light” cruiser. So CA was shifted to the “heavy” cruiser category.”

They had various types of fleet auxiliaries - transports (AT) , colliers (AC), oilers (tankers) (AO). The navy took some letter close to the first letter of the class as the class name.

They followed the category code with a hull number. The battleship New Jersey — BB-61 — was the 61st hull authorized. (Not all the hulls authorized got built, so there are gaps in the system.)

Then, after this system came along someone started putting aircraft — both heavier than air and lighter than air — on navy ships. They could not use the second letter “A” because that meant “Armored.” So the went with “V” for
aViation.” Since the first aircraft carriers were intended as scouts — the eyes of the fleet — aircraft carriers were classified as cruisers. They became “CV.” Aircraft transports, seaplane tenders or other auxiliaries associated with aviation became AV. But despite the combat carriers being classified in the cruiser category, the navy decided to number those hulls independently — CV-1 was Langley, followed by CV-2 (Saratoga) and CV-3 (Lexington). (Although I might have those swapped.)

Then during WWII the classes of ships within a category started multiplying. There were not just light cruisers — there were anti-aircraft light cruisers. They became “CLAA.” And no category had more types than aircraft carriers — there were fleet carriers (CV) light fleet carriers (CVL), escort carriers (originally AVE for auxiliary, aviation, escort, but later changed to CVE), large fleet carriers (the Coral Sea class), CVB. And more.

Incidentally, just to confuse things, the CVBs and CVLs were numbered along with the CVs (so there is a gap in the numbering of the Essex class CVs that is filled by the Independence class CVLs), but they numbered the escort carriers (CVEs) independently.

After WWII the navy started differentiating the carrier by function: CVA - attack carrier, CVH - helicopter carriers, etc. They started adding “N” at the end of a category if the ship were nuclear powered — SSN for nuclear submarine, as opposed to vanilla SS — diesel powered subs. So the heavy cruiser Long Beach was a CAN, and Enterprise was originally CVAN — Attack Carrier, Nuclear.

With the reduction of types of carrier, the navy eventually dropped the “Attack” letter, changing Enterprise back to CVN.

This is from memory, so there are probably some errors, but the overall outline should be accurate.