Some corrections.

As I stated near the end of my post, last night, the situation felt wrong with so many air getting thru for a big kill on the Akagi.

So what happened in actual fact is the following:

At the outer ring the from the prior rolls we had a no loss. The Medium height units now face flak/AA and lose 2 to aborts and one eliminated [2/1]in the Inner Ring.
What this means is 2AP are lost to an abort, and one eliminated.

So we switch from counting strength factors to counting AP step losses here when resolving AA. Now while this may seem like its inconsistent, if we stop for a moment and just examine the masses of rounds expended at these incoming AP [each being about 10 aircraft] it makes perfect sense to expect more significant losses. We just have to do the gymnastics and read the chart for the definition as its no terribly clear in the rules.

Moving to the Core Ring –

The Low attack slice receives 1/0 so one of the 2 Torpedo Bombers is out.

At the Medium height we get another 1/0, so one more SBD is lost to an abort.

This leaves 1 TBD coming in from sector or slice 2 and 2 SBD’s coming from sector 3. Lets re roll these attacks:

Low has 5 CF attacking a unit at speed 3 and rolls a miss.

The Medium attack however has 12 CF for Ship attacks hitting a unit at speed class 3. with a 1d6 roll of 6 it scores 20 hit factors. We compare this to the defence value of the Akagi and get a 5:1 for our roll on the CRT

The USN SBD’s dive bomb the huge flight deck, and brave all the flak. Rolling a 5 they score a D4! She is in essence dead in the water. Now we are supposed to roll for a critical hit. I’m unclear ‘when this happens. But post result seems to be a good time. We roll a 6. For the IJN that is a crit. So the result goes up a level to S or Sunk.