Intrepid
Major
Yes.
CV-18 Fujian/003 CATOBAR carrier thread
- Thread starter Jeff Head
- Start date
The post World War II US carrier design is characterized by 3 things:
1. Infrastructure limitation - much of the docking facilities supporting US super carriers were built during WWII, and the Enterprise was the heaviest unconstrained design that would fit. Nimitz and Ford were all slightly heavier, but their hull shapes where hydrodynamically suboptimal to enable them to fit existing graving docks. They were not optimally sized and shaped for operation. They were optimally sized and shaped to fit in existing graving docks.
2. Consistency of role and absence of peer opponents - the primary role of US carriers during all of post war period was power projection. Never did post war US carriers design have to seriously consider the design implications of carrier on carrier peer power battle.
3. Extreme design conservatism - across 5 classes and 19 ships, US post war carrier design saw only one significant design change. This is not because the design reached unimprovable perfection. The 4 catapult, 4 elevator design was understood to reflect unrealizable operational requirements as early as 1960. But no charges were made to this layout for another 55 years.
In light of this. It is clear the sizes of Nimitz/Ford were very contingent on particular circumstances of USN since WWII. It is difficult to argue the US carriers were of some intrinsically “optimal size”.
I find this reasoning difficult to follow, for at least two reasons:
1. Dry dock 12 at Newport News Shipbuilding, where the Ford class carriers are built is 662 by 76 metres. How is that a limitation?
2. The US spent 100s of billions of dollars on constructing aircraft carriers since WW2. If they needed larger drydocks, building them would've barely amounted to 1% of that sum.
There appears to be ample space in the dry dock to add a few more meters of beam to the ship (not to mention length), wouldn't you agree?
As in a vacant drydock at all times? Can you give some examples?
The financial burden then is not the cost of building larger drydocks, but keeping them vacant and operational? Any guess as to what that is?
Thats indeed the case. They are going to try and let the ship be scrapped by civilians and the reactor part stored for later scrapping.
But its offtopic?
Interesting video