I’m thinking more about a battlefield like Afghanistan, where the opponents aren’t firing anything larger than a stinger, and there is already air superiority. As buoyancy is a function of volume, which increases to the third power, and armor just needs to increase proportional to the surface area, which is the second power, a heavily armored floating aircraft carrier seems possible.
A 97000 ton aircraft carrier is equal in weight to the amount of air in a 450M x 450M x 450M cube. Aircraft carriers are only 320M long, so this doesn’t seem that far fetched.
