Posted on 12/05/2017 9:39:13 AM PST by sukhoi-30mki
Not that I recall. Don’t know where they got that from. I suppose if the plane had a MER on each wing station loaded with MK-82s, maybe they would. I don’t recall they were in the practice of coming back with them anyway, but that was a long time ago.
In peacetime, when they took off with them, they were gonna get dropped.
And I can certainly tell you that Tomcats weren’t going to fire or jettison any Phoenix missiles if they didn’t expend them, that is for damned sure!
And that was a pretty heavy missile, at least half a ton. They occasionally had four, but usually two and a couple of sparrows and sidewinders.
Thanks for the ping, Chode!
* What the Navy wanted most of all from the Super Hornet was a parameter called "bring-back weight". The original F/A-18A/B/C/D Hornet -- here simply referred to as the "Hornet I", again for convenience -- was overweight and could not land on a carrier carrying much more than AAMs and empty drop tanks. If it was carrying bombs or other air-to-ground munitions, it had to discard them before landing.
That hadn't been such a problem in the past, because in the 1980s the Navy still mostly relied on iron bombs, cluster munitions, and unguided rocket pods. Combat doctrine in those times usually assumed that such munitions could be dumped on a secondary target if the primary couldn't be hit, and since such munitions were inaccurate to begin with, they were dropped even if target visibility wasn't the best, in hopes of inflicting some damage anyway. If worst came to worst and they had to be discarded, they weren't too expensive, with iron bombs described as being "as cheap as hamburger" on a weight basis.
However, by the end of the 1980s, precision-guided "smart munitions" had begun to predominate. The lethal accuracy of smart munitions meant one relatively expensive munition could be used to destroy a target, instead of several cheap iron bombs. Smart weapons also greatly reduced the risk of "collateral damage" to unintended civilian targets; with the rise of the "dirty little conflicts" of the 1990s, collateral damage became increasingly unacceptable, further reinforcing the usefulness of smart munitions.
Smart munitions were more expensive than iron bombs and couldn't be discarded so easily. Furthermore, the heightened concerns over collateral damage meant that such munitions weren't going to be dropped if there was a serious chance of them going astray, or if there were uncertainties about the legitimacy of a target. In sum, that meant that an aircraft was likely to often come back to a carrier with unexpended munitions that cost too much to just dump. An improved Hornet simply had to have a greater bring-back weight.
Excerpt.
The battle group loses the AO to refuel the escort vessels in the CVBG then the CVBG is going to have to find more fuel or turn back. The CVN cannot operate alone. CVNs are a waste. Nuclear subs make sense by surface nukes, not so much..
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