Posted on 10/23/2017 10:58:53 AM PDT by sukhoi-30mki
> The planners are fighting two wars ago. <
Same as it always was.
And when war breaks out, those planners get a lot of people killed. One sad example of this (out of many): the sinking of the Prince of Wales and Repulse in 1941.
With the prospect of China’s naval expansion and possible remote island hopping conflicts.
Is there a future for Anphib/sea plane tenders ? Close support fighters and sea plane cargo/troop carrying transports ?
I want one! Does it come with a one-eyed Angelina Jolie?
land-based drones will be the future of everything, and the key will be survivability, and securing internet and command-and-control operational links after something like an EMP.
Just need a big ship with docking ability for those seaplanes.
I want one. But, I have enough maintenance to do on my boats now.
Ok, I would take it if offered.
How about another alternative:
Top deck: Recover aircraft ONLY.
Next Deck (Current Hanger Deck): Launch aircraft ONLY - through aperture in bow, or off-angle.
Next Deck: Hanger Deck.
result: ship is shorter, and one deck taller.
Once you specify “nuke propulsion” you’re making things very expensive. When the Navy runs one of these studies they always seem to confirm the wisdom of what they are currently doing. Imagine that?
What they need to do is pull an LHA/LHD from the Gator fleet and begin serious studies of unmanned drone aircraft. Start pushing the state of the art in order to create a new alternative. This is how the CV came into being in the interwar years.
The CVN-LX looks promising.
I guess we are thinking in a similar direction. Except my aircraft don’t need pilots on board. You can launch them faster, they can fly in ways that you could not do with an onboard pilot. And you can have different drones for different tactics.
The ship would be a lower profile with more space for self defense and extra armor. With a airborne drone armada, you can program them to do this things en masse that piloted aircraft could never do.
This is not eliminate the need for pilots, it just eliminates these from the aircraft.
The big IJN carriers were orginally built to fly aircraft directly from the hangar deck. The CV-5 Yorktown-class had hangar deck waist catapults that could launch a fighter or scout-bomber from the hangar deck. They were eventually removed from the Enterprise CV-6 and I don’t think that they were incluse at all in the Essex-class.
It's been done before ...
Agreed. Either land-based or launched from standoff platforms, and powerfully weaponized.
Not this light carrier stuff again...
Carriers are there to launch and recover aircraft, enough to matter and often enough to get the job done. To do this requires:
- a flight deck w/cats & arresting gear... large footprint
- ordinance for planes ...volume and tonnage
- fuel for planes ...volume and tonnage
- storage for planes ... volume
- parts and repairs for planes ... volume
- propulsion to operate aircraft and get where needed
fossil fueled: cheaper, but fuel bunkers and air shafts(both ways) eat volume and effect arrangement.
nuclear: expensive, but opens more volume for purposes above, and does not interfere with other arrangements.
Obviously a simplified argument, and EMALS seems to still be evolving issue, but the best modern carrier is a big nuclear volume box that carries all that is needed to perform the spectrum of missions that may be assigned.
We do have some smaller carriers like the helicopter carriers.
Or just a bunch of little ships. That way when the enemy is sighted, they can just scatter.
21st century internet admirals have a grand old time bashing Halsey, I think, for the most part, he has taken a bad rap.
Kurita’s central force in the Sibuyan Sea heading for Leyte, had turned back west after Halsey’s planes had sunk the battleship Musashi, the sister ship to the Yamato, the two biggest battleships ever built. A previous attack by US subs had sunk another part of Kurita’s fleet.
From the intelligence Halsey had, his planes had turned the central force back, and was no longer a threat. The southern force coming through the Surigao Strait would be contained by Admiral Oldendorf’s battleships. Halsey gets wind of another IJN force with carriers coming down from the north.
Sure, after the fact we can say he should have stayed at Leyte to protect the landing, instead of going after the northern force, but with the intelligence he had why not go after the northern force? We’d expect as much from “Bull” Halsey. McArthur called him “the fightingest admiral in the Navy.”
“...and securing internet and command-and-control operational links after something like an EMP.”
Good point...after an EMP it will be aircraft with mechanically-driven control surfaces with human pilots flying them. The rest of our air force will consist of pilots cursing their way down to the ground in this high tech fighter planes.
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