The Pentagon's biggest, baddest - and costliest - piece of hardware ever

USS Fletcher, Spruance class destroyer, sunk by HMAS Waller.

Unidentified Leander (?) class frigate being sunk

More interesting here, though. A 15,000-20,000 tonne freighter wrecked by one torpedo.


I think a ship under motion torpedo'd in such a fashion would sink within a minute, in the same way ships at speed which had their backs broken, like HMS Hood, were simply halved by the force of the explosion and by their own momentum.

rangerdanger
reply to post by Vasa Croe

 

It's gonna have some warfare capabilities but these carriers aren't loaded down with guns. They load them with planes, not guns. It'll have some defensive weapons, but like the other poster said, this thing will never sail alone. Carriers sail with a whole fleet of warships.

COME AT ME BRO

The uninvited guest: Chinese sub pops up in middle of U.S. Navy exercise, leaving military chiefs red-faced

American military chiefs have been left dumbstruck by an undetected Chinese submarine popping up at the heart of a recent Pacific exercise and close to the vast U.S.S. Kitty Hawk - a 1,000ft supercarrier with 4,500 personnel on board.

Russian bomber buzzes U.S. aircraft carrier

American fighter jets intercepted two Russian bombers, one of which buzzed a U.S. aircraft carrier in the western Pacific on Saturday, U.S. military officials told CNN Monday. Russia's Defense Ministry said Tuesday that there was no violation of flight regulations during the incident. A ministry official said the flights are standard operating procedure for air force training. One of them twice flew about 2,000 feet over the deck of the USS Nimitz Saturday while another flew about 50 miles away, officials said. Two others were at least 100 miles away, the military reported.

Loose lips sink ships!! I bet it can fly as well. Hmmmmm....thought. Shield has a flying carrier in the Marvel comics universe. I wonder if that is even possible?

You guys are right. You know more than the designers and the guys that decide policy for the navy. Carriers are obsolete in the face of modern ships and torpedoes and it's stupid to build them.

reply to post by Zaphod58


And you're just complacent and full of ... US hubris.

reply to post by LeBombDiggity


On the contrary. I've never said you can't sink a carrier or that we'll never lose one. I've always said it's not nearly as easy as you and others try to make it out to be, as proven by the tests on the America.

I'm a realist when it comes to warfare. I know we'll lose carriers and ships in a major war, but the notion that you can compare a destroyer or frigate being hit by a torpedo and say that a carrier will have the same result is ridiculous.

reply to post by Zaphod58


As proven by the tests on USS America ?

Proof ? You've got the USS America Sinkex damage assessments, have you ?

Feel free to share. Because as far as I know, they've never been published. That's because they're classified. And they're classified because the basic nuts & bolts of that ship are shared by the Nimitz class, which are still in service. And why dare broadcast ship weaknesses to an enemy, right ?

But, hell, if you've got proof, or some special insight which accords you the title of Mister Smugpants, feel free to share instead of the smoke & mirrors routine. Tell us how she was sunk. Missile, mines, torpedo, scuttling ... can you even share the method of her sinking ?

Thought not.

reply to post by LeBombDiggity


The actual results are classified as to the amount of damage but there are unclassified reports, and comments by the people involved in it, about the fact that she stood up to everything they hit her with until they finally scuttled her.

You can mission kill a carrier or knock her out for awhile relatively easily. But to kill one, of any nation, takes a lot more than one or two torpedoes.

I'm curious, since most of the aircraft the US is developing are VSTOL (vertical/short take off and landing), and emphasize on stealth. Why not focus on more lighter, cheaper, carriers that can support these planes since most missions are surgical in nature now days?

I'm not saying we don't need juggernauts like this, and the fleet that accompany it, but maybe not so many need to be deployed at once.

Maybe these lighter carriers and fleets could hold some of the slack while the large carrier fleets alternate; while one is out on patrol, the other is getting repairs and R&R.

Zaphod58
You can mission kill a carrier or knock her out for awhile relatively easily. But to kill one, of any nation, takes a lot more than one or two torpedoes.

No it doesn't, Zaphod. Aircraft carriers are perhaps easier to sink because they're not as compartmentalized as others due to all that hangar space. And that's even before you consider that modern torpedos are designed to break the ship in two.

All you need do is explode one torpedo under a carrier. If it's back doesn't break, the machinery will be so shaken that your ship will be out of the war for years. It'd probably be cheaper to build a new ship than repair it. And that's so much more true of a nuclear powered ship, with all the scope for radiation hazards.

You're being complacent, Zaphod. The ocean floor is littered with torpedoed aircraft carriers ... ones sunk by traditional contact torpedoes, not the backbreakers in service today.

reply to post by majesticgent


The F-35B will be carried on the Wasp and America class ships. They're meant more to give Marine landing forces their own air support close at hand, more than for a full deck carrier mission.

reply to post by LeBombDiggity


The lower decks are very compartmentalized. The hangar deck is only on the upper portion of the hull.

I'm well aware how many are down there. And how much construction has changed since WWII. I'm also willing to bet that the people that have access to a lot better information than we do have also taken all this into account as well.

reply to post by Zaphod58


I'm aware of the those classes, but what I was thinking is something like a hybrid between the large and the tactical carriers.

Yeah, and that's just what they're telling everyone about.

Now propel your mind twenty years into the future and use your imagination. That's what they AREN'T telling you about.

reply to post by majesticgent


They're sort of doing that, but they'll be of limited use. The first two America class will be the closest to that idea because they won't have a well deck. It comes down to money vs fleet size.

Zaphod58
I'm well aware how many are down there. And how much construction has changed since WWII. I'm also willing to bet that the people that have access to a lot better information than we do have also taken all this into account as well.

Well, how much has hull construction changed since WWII ?

Forgot the glamor stuff up top, protected hangar spaces, angled armored flight decks, sponson gun removal blah blah, they're just baubles on the tree. Forget damage control & crew training. Because that won't matter when your hull breaks in two. The only think that'll matter is abandoning ship smartly.

So in terms of how the hull is put together ... and that's the most important thing when your ship's being torpedoed ... can you explain the improvements in hull construction from Midway to Forrestal to Kitty Hawk to Enterprise to Nimitz class ? That covers a design period from the early 1940's to the mid 1960's.

You seem to think that some amazing revolution happened in US aircraft carrier design during that period which renders modern aircraft carriers less vulnerable to torpedo damage than before. I don't think that happened. In fact, I think the Nimitz class is probably more vulnerable than it's predecessors. That's because they carry much more ordnance & fuel than before in a basic hull design & manufacture unchanged since the 1950's.

See, I think survivability of US carriers has always played second fiddle to capability. I guess in the nuclear age that doesn't really matter, the world war would be over in a week or two anyway.

reply to post by LeBombDiggity


Instead of just an armor belt like they used in WWII, Nimitz and her sisters use a double keel, including hardened steel, and a gap between inner and outer keels to limit torpedo damage.

reply to post by Zaphod58


And you think that cuts it ?

Hope springs eternal.

reply to post by LeBombDiggity


It makes them more survivable than they were, between armor and the double hull.

Unless you have access to all the systems in the ship and all the weapons data you can't sit here and say they're obsolete or easy to kill. On the one hand you go after me for saying America proved how hard they are to sink without having the SinkEx data, but you're doing the same thing saying they're easy to sink with less data.

Vasa Croe
That got me thinking though. Doesn't this make this ship a VERY large target for any other force in the world? I mean imagine the boost to an attacking country if they targeted and sank this ship and imagine the detriment to the morale of the US forces if this happened.

The question that pops to my mind when I hear of such projects is, "Who is our enemy?" This ship will be of no use to us against somebody setting off a dirty nuke in Times Square.

This thing is a huge white collar welfare project designed to keep people employed. Creating jobs for people. That's its mission.