That said, we could have made more than 195 of the them, but even at 750 it would have still been significantly more expensive per aircraft than the F-35 and it wouldn’t have let us cancel the F-35 program.
It would cost an insane amount of money.... but... It already does cost an insane amount of money, and then we have to run three separate military aviation programs for different regimes.
As to cost, in many ways a cruise ship is a better comparison than a cargo ship. The giant crew needed to maintain and operate a large aircraft fleet themselves need support staff, supplies, housing, etc. Carriers are expensive because of the people and systems onboard not the size of the ship.
Even just moving aircraft up and down from the flight deck requires a massive and thus expensive system. Civilian nuclear reactor are hideously expensive to build and operate let alone a system designed to ramp up and down more quickly, operate on a moving ship etc. Close in weapon systems have limited field of fire when you want a clear flight deck etc.
So sure, in theory you could just say we want a larger flight deck and are going to just have a number of empty components to pad out the ship but it’s not so simple.
