Best I can do for Tico are photos from
her 1945 Kamikaze damage report. I made a
separate page that has the list of attached photos and photo captions / descriptions that should help. Mostly the photos are focused and not "wide" so it can be a bit hard to mentally place them and figure out the details but shots like
931-45 might help with ladder placement and
932-45 should give you an idea about the light locker to the forecastle deck at the forward end of the hangar bay. Most of the photos list the frame number and which direction they're looking, so you at least have a foundation to start with, but I've found that a lot of the hangar structure was c0omplex enough that it can be a little bewildering.
Hangar space was "boring" so you don't see as many photos as you do top side and when you do the photographers often used flash or lighting on subjects so the background details are often dark/in shadow or out of focus. Of all of the many photos I scanned at NARA very, very few are of the hangar bay and Those tend to be fairly "common" in what they focus on. I have a few photos, for example, of the area forward of the port hangar deck-edge elevator because ships tended to hold religious services there, but I have no good photos showing the aft elevator area forward and aft of the elevator itself on any ship. It's one of the things that's been holding me back from wanting to finish "the book" to be honest.
As far as catwalks go, yes, the walkway portions used what you refer to as punch plate. Overhead walkways in the hangar bay used a slat arrangement of some type you may see in the Ticonderoga photos for what it is worth. Photos of the entire walkway can be hard to find and I tend to pay attention to the shadows beneath (example:
this photo from CV-13 Franklin's
appendecies to the
1944 Kamikaze strike shipyard report shows a pattern in the shadow under the #3 twin 5"/38 mount. If you look carefully, you can also see it in
this Navsource photo of
CV-13 Franklin following her
March 1945 bombing.
_________________
Tracy White -
Researcher@Large"Let the evidence guide the research. Do not have a preconceived agenda which will only distort the result."
-
Barbara Tuchman