The final countdown.

[griffeytrek]

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The real problem with doing anything long term with this would be answering the question, "Why isn't the technical crew and the ship being scooped into some skunk-works?"

I think the answer is that unless they failed to protect Pearl Harbor they would be. Not just the technical crew. All of the crew. Because even the cooks will know the damage control duties for the ship and be valuable understanding her. The only reason to keep her in theater is if somehow the systems didn't work right. Like the Phoenix missiles could not get proper lock-on to the mostly wooden aircraft. So the Nimitz blunts the attack and harms the Japanese fleet. But does not prevent said attack. Therefore is needed for support of things like the Aleutian Islands campaign etc. Till the fleet is restored. And by then she would be a proper flagship. (Though someone would likely rename her since she was named for an admiral that was in active duty at the time)

Part of that would involve a more complicated question involving the actual capabilities of a 1980's carrier vs the Kido Buttai's Pearl Harbor Strike Forces.

Once the 1st Wave Japanese Strike was airborne, would the Nimitz, and the Nimitz alone, without her normal supporting task force, have the capability of stopping that first wave of airborne strikes heading into Pearl? The answer to that is a much more ambiguous Maybe. At that point the Nimitz would have been carrying roughly a Dozen Tomcats as her main, and almost sole mechanism for engaging aerial combatants. The Japanese Carriers launched 420 aircraft in 2 waves of ~ 200 planes each, plus some scout/search planes. Spaced 45 minutes apart. How much ammo do Tomcats carry? At the speeds they fly how many airplanes can they shoot down per high speed pass? At best what they could probably do would be to disrupt the first attack wave. The Tomcats could 100% find and intercept the Japanese planes thanks to the Hawkeyes. But at the speeds they fly they would not be able to well differentiate the Zero's from the Kates and Vals to know to just pick off the bombers. And yeah there are questions as to just how effective the Sidewinders would be against the slower moving, not entirely metal prop planes.

But the second wave is where things get interesting. The Nimitz could at that point stop it cold and end the entire war in a few minutes. And they could do it with their Anti Sub Patrol planes. Which also carried anti ship missiles. The Nimitz could end the Kido Buttai, all 6 Japanese Carriers with the second strike still sitting on her decks. Or they could simply bomb the ever living shit out of the entire Japanese fleet with the A-6's. The Primary mission profile for Kirk Douglas would have been to send the Tomcats to harass the inbound Pearl strike, while sending everything else to sink every Japanese ship. The attack planes would not need fighter cover. They could fly and attack from altitudes above what the Japanese Aircraft or Anti Aircraft Fire could reach. Heck the Kido Buttai had no radar. They would not even know anything was coming until the ships were on fire.

The problem was in 1941 the Japanese Navy launched more combat aircraft in that single strike than all but 3 modern land based air forces actually operate in total. The Carrier of 1980 was not real well equipped to deal with a low tech high volume swarm of aircraft. At least not unless they got in close enough for the Carriers own Anti Aircraft defenses to open up.

[Madner Kami]

Nimitz wouldn't need to completely destroy the attack wave(s), just disrupting the first one to either stall or encourage aborting the attack, while at the same time alerting the forces nearby to the japanese attack would be enough.
Pearl Harbour was fully capable of defending itself from that massive strike (not without losses of course) and so a simple warning to Pearl, while harassing the incoming strike, either delaying or entirely aborting it, would be enough and unlike a radio communication that is lost along the chain of command, a Tomcat descending from the skies, it's engines screeching while flying full thrust at roof-level and making passes while breaking the sound-barrier will inevitably catch attention and alert the base.
Also, the US Navy had potential strike forces nearby, that could reach out to the japanese fleet. Nothing nearly as massive, but Enterprise herself sent out a strike force consisting of 18 SBDs Dauntless and about the same amount of scouts/fighters to attack the japanese fleet, but simply didn't find them. If they could have interfaced with Nimitz' command and control, they would have found their target and left a mark.

Fun-fact: Low-tech swarm-attacks are the weakpoint of every modern military, land, sea or air. It's funny how the technological development forced the big players to focus on lower numbers and ever higher tech, which leaves a huge blindspot in modern militaries around the world, which would be their achilles heel in any engagement against "old forces" or is, indeed, their achilles heel in modern engagements as well.

Oh and on a technical level, presuming everything goes as planned, each F-14 can take out 6 Zeroes with missiles only. As for the vulcan gatling gun, the Tomcat can be expected to always have the energy advantage on the japanese planes and unlike US-pilots of the early war period, the Tomcat pilots are trained to never give up that advantage in an engagement and will use it extensively, similarly to what the US implemented later in the war, once they learned from their mistakes (compare to the "Great Mariana's Turkey Shoot"). The Tomcat can and will always attack from an angle, that the japanese planes will be weakest from and outside of some freak happenings (aka pilots becoming careless), no Tomcat will be "sprayed" in such a pass. The Vulcan M61 has a capacity of 676 bullets and fires at fixed rates of either 4000 or 6000 shots per minute, depending on what is preset before take-off. The "salvos" can also be preset to either 50, 100, 200 or unlimited shots per trigger-pull. Typically, 200 shots at 6000r(ounds)pm was the default, but I would fully expect the Nimitz-crew to have the presence of mind to not use the settings for jet-warfare and go for a 50/4000 setting, which means a Tomcat can potentially kill 6 (missiles) + 13 (gatling) japanese planes.

The real kicker would be the knock-on effect though, if Nimitz begins striking the japanese fleet. They would focus on the carriers and that would completely break the japanese's back in pretty much every major historical engagement by consequence. Almost(!) every single engagment was decided by the carrier-aviation and in the absence of that, Japan would be in the exact same position they were in post-Midway, except in 1941 already, and in the few engagements where aviation was not the deciding factor, recon was and Nimitz can provide that in spades, even if it ran out of ammunition.

[Admiral X]

I'd kind of like to see Chuck cover the anime Zipang and have him compare/contrast them. It would be kind of interesting, because the Japanese crew was a lot more conflicted about even doing anything, and it turns out that the decision of one officer to rescue someone from a sinking plane has some pretty big consequences later.