We’ll ignore the rest of the Carrier Group and say that the USS Enterprise (NCC 1701) beamed down a landing party. It would only take a couple of minutes for the crew to set Condition Zebra….meaning all of those watertight doors are closed and latched, isolating every part of the ship.

Since you came aboard on the flight deck you would have no access to much of the ships systems and would have been able to eliminate just a relative handful of the crew. Your reinforcements that are supposed to land on the flight deck would be in trouble from both the Phalanx system and Sea Sparrow missile systems, which are controlled from inside the ship.

So no reinforcements. Now your force realizes that there is no help coming and they are stuck on the flight deck.

Now the Captain turns on the flight deck wash down system….

So your team is standing on a moving ship, on a steel deck with a rather substantial sprinkler system going off.

Next the Old Man just starts doing Sea Trial maneuvers…

Imagine trying to stay upright on a very wet, flat steel deck while this is going on.

This is a fairly typical watertight door on a ship, albeit evidently quite an old ship and one which hasn’t been maintained to the highest standards.

However imagine you have a highly skilled elite SF operative on one side, and on the other you have a young sailor just passed out of training, on their first day onboard a ship. That SF operative isn’t getting anywhere. There is a “game” that used to be played, a bit like whack a mole. Put all the clips on, as soon as someone tries to open one you just flip it back.

They will never get all 8 open before you have been able to close a couple again. This can literally go on for hours. Yup you could potentially have a few people try to open at once, but you just use a pry bar to close it then sit on the handle. No amount of people are going to get leverage to open the bar and lift 80kg.

OK after a while they will resort to blowing the doors off or taking an angle grinder to it, but each set is a double set of doors and there are probably several hundred or thousands on a ship, particularly an aircraft carrier. Letting off explosives in a metal can isn’t a great idea and angle grinding is pretty time consuming, especially once you have run out of either or both before reaching anything more interesting than a few offices and stores.

I am not saying this is the main defence of a ship, I’m simply saying that even if you took all weapons from the ship, even if the escorts didn’t blast any helo reinforcements from the sky, even if they did manage to land on the flight deck, even if you didn’t have any ships protection force onboard, it would still be extremely time consuming and frustrating to try and progress, assuming the Ship’ s Company could get into position. Even if they couldn’t, this would still happen before the invading force could get far, and they would be slowed to a crawl trying to progress.

There are also areas on ships which can effectively become remote death zones to people not familiar with them. Most ships have fire suppression systems in some compartments which can be operated remotely.

These can be high pressure steam, toxic gas, or removing the oxygen from a compartment. These would all be used against any invading force which was very slowly creeping through the ship. There would be comms throughout as they slowly progressed until they went into a space where they could be ambushed.

So in effect they would never get close. If they did, they may just be able to operate a quick dynamic action on the flight deck but the action would quickly grind to a halt and the Ship’s Company would again have the initiative.