No planes to fly from it, no pilots trained to fly from it, just another target without air cover.
And color me skeptical, but a civilian satellite just snapping pictures of the ocean happens to catch this thing underway, right.
bob
Plus, the small ramp-end carriers are made for STOL/VTOL fighters, like the Harrier, or YAK-whatever the Russians had almost no success with.
So even if you pull off a successful VTOL naval fighter, they tend to have shorter legs than catapult/wire captured fighters.
I'm aware the U.S. Marines operate the Harrier, and there's a VTOL version of the F-35 JSF, but that's a good compliment to their capabilities, which are presumed to take place in the wider arena of U.S. naval and air superiority.
If short legged VTOL's are all you've got. And lumpy-bumpy-frumpy copies of a mediocre-at-best Soviet design that killed a lot of pilots, you're just boned.
Like the UAV secrets in the other thread, it's not even so much the tech itself that's the "secret" it's all the logistics, operations, and supporting systems and organization that make it all work. And that isn't so much even a secret. It's a culture. Either you have it, or you don't.