Replies

Take a close look at the flight deck and the sides of the hull. Aircraft carriers, meaning jets, have discernable elevators in the flight deck, access to the hanger deck. Real modern carries have elevators on the port and starboard outboard edges of the flight deck. Also normally visible are the vast openings in the SIDES of the hanger deck, both port and starboard.

The determining factor for deck-edge elevators is usually whether the flight deck is the ship's strength deck, or if the strength deck is the hangar deck, with the flight deck mounted on top of it.

Cutting large holes in the side of a hull below the strength deck is generally a bad idea. Which is why many carriers have elevators in the center of their flight decks rather than at the edge.

But there's an engineering/design trick that the USN came up with that was incorporated into the supercarriers, allowing deck-edge elevators while also having the flight deck as the strength deck. Allegedly this design trick is still classified.