@_Fallen_King_ The Yamato was destroyed by planes, in the only battle in participated for real, if the Hornet and Enterprise accidentally went against a lone Yamato during the Doolittle attack, as the MC says the Yamato should be used there, the two carriers would be definitely outside of Yamato’s main guns range, and the Yamato would definitely have no idea of were the carriers would be, while the Hornet and Enterprise, would’ve definitely accidentally find the Yamato with a scout plane
The Yamato was basically Japan’s Bismarck, their pride of the navy, main flagship, and extremely costly to make, so what would happen if their main flagship was sunk right at the start of the pacific war? A huge blow to morale, because it would also be combined with the bombing of Tokyo, and the army could even end up using the Yamato’s early sinking to convince the government to fund them and not the navy, to which it wouldn’t change very much or it would make the pacific war somewhat easier for the Americans, since the Japanese would be more demoralized due to Yamato’s early sinking
Now, with or without Yamato trying to intervene in the Doolittle attack, there wouldn’t be a lot of change in the war, if the Yamato’s is sunk then the MC lots it’s only connection to say anything else that happens in the war, making the war go basically in the same manner, but with a lower Japanese morale, if it’s not sunk, and by that it means it doesn’t intervene in the Doolittle attack, the MC could try to say that the Americans broke the Japanese code, but would anyone in the high command believe a crewmate of a ship that didn’t had any experience in code messaging? No, and the Japanese had one chance of finding out their code was broken, when the Americans sent some messages without any real strategic value to confirm that they had broke the Japanese secret codes, so the real change would definitely come if the Japanese won the battle of Midway, that even with that happened it would just be a setback to the Americans, since they would easily outproduce the Japanese, and the Yamato was supposed to participate in the battle of Midway, but couldn’t for a series of reasons
So that is my reasoning, a single battleship can’t make a nation win a war when the battleships were already obsolete, but it can cripple their own morale more than enough to make a difference when sunk