USN now smallest since before WW1.

[Lonestar]

Originally posted by Azazel
Wow, I never knew the Carrier had a double hull.

It ain't a carrier....it's a LHA.

[Dr Strangelove]

Imagine what the battle of Jutland would have been like if the allies had had even a single nuclear submarine!

[Alexander's Horse]

The US rules the waves. I don't see much to worry about here.

Interesting the 300 ships figure. That was roughly what the British had to police global shipping lanes in their heyday. I'm talking about the 18th and 19th century.

[TCO]

A man is only truly free...at sea.

[Alexander's Horse]

I would have liked to have been in the Navy or Merchant shipping but I didn't like science or maths at school so I pretty much ruled that out.

[SKILORD]

Who cares about that garbage, where's our space navy?

[Henrik]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove


Wasn't the UK named "Airbase #10" in 1984 ?

Airstrip One

[Master Zen]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
The fleet in WW1 mainly consisted of an enormus number of destroyers because its chief msson was to protect merchant ships from submarines. At the time radar didn't exist and sonar was essentially limited to surveying a small cone of the ocean area directly under the ship. Heck, by the end of WW1 most destroyers had yet to be fitted with sonar, so the primary means of detecting subs was to spot them on the surface. Today's frigates have electronics that can survey hundreds of square miles of ocean with a reasonable probability of finding an enemy sub, so fewer ships are needed.

Not really. The U.S. battle fleet in WW1 was the third largest (by far) in the world, and in overall tonnage it was also third with around a million tons IIRC (Royal Navy was over 2 million and the German Navy between 1.5 and 2).

I don't have the exact tonnage figures at hand but here's a list of the units in Aug 14:

10 - Dreadnoughts
23 - Battleships (pre-Dreadnoughts)
12 - Armored Cruisers
27 - Cruisers (incl. light cruisers)
50 - Destroyers
27 - Submarines

Total - 147 ships.

[pchang]

nuclear power

Nuclear powered is overrated for carriers. Sure, the ship has plenty of electricy and can sail around the world many times without refuelling, but the planes all need jet fuel and the ship can only carry so many bullets, bombs, and missiles. You have to constantly resupply carriers every few days under full operations. Adding another supply run to refuel the carrier itself is no big deal.

[Mordoch]

Re: nuclear power

Originally posted by pchang
Nuclear powered is overrated for carriers. Sure, the ship has plenty of electricy and can sail around the world many times without refuelling, but the planes all need jet fuel and the ship can only carry so many bullets, bombs, and missiles. You have to constantly resupply carriers every few days under full operations. Adding another supply run to refuel the carrier itself is no big deal.

I've got to strongly disagree. I think you are heavily exaggerating how often it has to be. (At some point ordinance may be a problem, but that assumes a heavily bombing campaign is going on.) Furthermore, a 100,000 ton carrier would consume one heck of alot of fuel to move it at the speeds it goes at. You're looking at needing a certain size ship to resupply a carrier's other needs. You'd need a seperate large one to supply the carrier's fuel. I also suspect you're going to use up alot of the ship's space holding all that fuel. The basic problem is you are exagerating how often a carrier needs to be supplied, and ignoring that the refueling would have to be done even when full combat opperations are not going on.

[pchang]

full operations

I meant full combat operations - under those conditions, ordnance has to be replaced every 3 days. jet fuel, a little less often.

As for refuelling under normal operations, this is most often done at port for non-carriers. No need to change things for carriers.

[Japher]

I meant full combat operations - under those conditions, ordnance has to be replaced every 3 days. jet fuel, a little less often.

Would the ships gain more payload space by switching to nuclear power? I mean no large bulk full of ship fuel? Replace that space with more jet fuel or ammo and the likes... So it could probably stay out longer...

[Mordoch]

Re: full operations

Originally posted by pchang
As for refuelling under normal operations, this is most often done at port for non-carriers. No need to change things for carriers.

Of course, particularly for the US, this potentially makes your Carriers vulnerable to terrorist acts (such as the USS Cole) and other covert opperation strikes. At least for awhile, the US stopped refueling a Middle Eastern ports and did midsea refueling instead. Regardless if you carriers are caught in port refueling when the enemy launches a strike, the consquences are unlikely to be pleasant.

[CerberusIV]

Checking through my library I found an estimate (based on Jane's figures) that a Nimitz class carrier carries the same sized air group as a Forrestal class. However, although the Nimitz class is larger (by 10-15,000 tons standard displacement - more for the later ships) it carries 90% more aviation fuel and 50% more ordnance, largely due to the space saving on not requiring oil fuel for the ship itself.

That makes a lot of difference over a sustained campaign, particularly not needing oilers to refuel teh carrier itself.

[pchang]

Port

Of course, ships go to port to give their crews a break too, terrorists or no. If an enemy launched a sneak attack, you have to accept that a certain fraction of your entire fleet will be in a port somewhere. The key is having good enough spies so that you are not caught totally unaware by the sneak attack. If I recall, there were no carriers at Pearl Harbor despite the fact that they were non-nuclear.