The problem with the airship carrier is that:
a) You can't really have a lot of them, which limits your amount of places to land at. With seaplanes, water is our landing strip and there's a lot of water, I assure you.
Also, the bigger they are, the more it hurts when they fall.
b) Easily detectable, even more than regular carriers.
c) Limits on size, weight and amount of planes it can carry.
d) It's a fucking airship, while yeah, historically they actually weren't that easy to take down, I can see many good ideas (flying torpedoes that penetrate through whole length of the ship,
"A-Winging the cabin", etc.) that could easily take them down.
The goal is to skip the age of heavy-weight battleship slugfests and jump straight to a more modern concept of carriers and destroyer escorts.
We'd have to spend next few turns on the navy, since we have literally no experience. Meanwhile, we have experience with planes, which I think will take much less designs and revisions to get around to be good. The goal is to skip the need of actually having a navy completly.
I suggest that (after designing a destroyer), we try for a floatplane, with retractable floats, to serve as a dedicated torpedo bomber. If it goes well, we can design more floatplanes, perhaps bypassing the need for carriers altogether.
While a floatplane (or, more accurately for what we are trying to design, a flying boat), is nice, I don't think it's very suitable as our main torpedo bomber. That's mostly because a both flying boats and float planes are by design slower and less manoeuvrable (and also bigger, ergo more vulnerable) than conventional planes.
The main part of flying boats being slower and less agile is that you have to put engines in less than favourable positions, which kinda necessities them to be big. Also, because they also have to be a ship at the same time. The main part of float planes being slower and less agile is that to have engines in favourable position, you need to have static floats sticking out of the bottom which create a lot of drag.
Retractable floats solve that problem.
Also note that old-timey article: "ten planes". Even the crappiest of carriers in this period carried 20-25, Japanese fleet carriers had 50+ planes, and the attack on Pearl Harbor involved 400+. I dunno how we're going to build 40 of those things, or five of them for one carrier.
Float planes also solve that. You can have 400+ planes easily just hang around an atoll or something, with way more of them launching at one time than from aircraft carriers.