OK, I'll say it.
The interactive scratchpad is very cool, but without any additional limits there must be thousands (or maybe tens of thousands) of ways to locate the ships.
For instance, with no effort at all, I put the aircraft carrier in column B, the battleships in column D, the cruisers in column F, and the destroyers in column H, all properly separated.
Are there maybe some more clues that were inadvertently omitted?