The nuclear carriers are VERY fast! I read on another site how one of them was reported to go from one place to another in a certain amount of time and if you did the math it worked out to 52 knots!!!
Crazy if that’s true! It’s like imagining the Empire State Building moving at freeway speeds!!!
I was an AC on the ship in 86-89. Once the ship reached a certain speed even those of us with a “secret” clearance wouldn’t know how many knots we were actually doing. If my memory serves me correctly the speedometers in the cattc would shut down at 28 knots.
Pretty cool part of my time on board was spent doing work ups in the Bering Sea. We were actually the only carrier to ever conduct flight operations there at the time. Donning the cold weather gear to perform a FOD walk down didn’t even come close to keeping us warm.
If I recall correctly the Carl Vinson was co-ed at the time I was in Alameda. I dated a girl who was an RPO (Religious Petty Officer) for a while before she went AWOL and never heard from her again. Could have been another vessel but I thought the Vinson.
Enterprise has eight reactors about the size of a submarine’s. IIRC it only took six to power everything including the catapults.
All of our large carriers are extremely fast. When I was on the JFK, we were heading across the Atlantic after leaving Norfolk, and I awoke in the early morning to the thudding of the screws, and my rack vibrating to the thuds.
It was extremely loud...to get a good approximation, whack your hand on a table 24 times in about six seconds. I got up and went down to the fantail, and there was a mountain of white water. Not quite a rooster tail, but a hill of water.
And the water was whipping by at an astonishing speed. I don’t know how fast those things go, but I can say, looking out the hangar bay doors at the water, it was like sitting on a bus going down a highway.