Posted on 06/03/2017 7:08:49 PM PDT by Oatka
The U.S. Navy has accepted delivery of its first next generation aircraft carrier, the future USS Gerald R. Ford (CVN 78), from Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding.
Delivery on Wednesday followed the ship’s successful completion of acceptance trials May 26.
Ford is the lead ship of its class and the first new-design aircraft carrier delivered to the Navy since USS Nimitz (CVN 68) in 1975. It is also the first aircraft carrier to join the fleet since USS George H. W. Bush (CVN 77) delivered in 2009.
The Gerald R. Ford class, designed to replace Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, delivers greater flexibility than its predecessors due to its larger flight deck, the ability to host more aircraft, additional weapons and aviation fuel storage, and a new electromagnetic aircraft launch and advanced arresting system. The Ford class also features a new nuclear power plant and a redesigned island, and will be able to increase sortie rates by one-third when compared to the Nimitz class. Further, the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier generates three times the amount of electricity as previous classes and is designed to rapidly add capabilities as new systems become available over the course of its projected 50-year service life.
Each Ford-class ship will also operate with a smaller crew than a Nimitz-class carrier and will provide $4 billion in total ownership cost savings for the Navy, according to Newport News Shipbuilding.
(Excerpt) Read more at gcaptain.com ...
Rail gun catapult.
Instead of the reactors making steam to launch aircraft, they make electricity.
I've seen some concept drawings of a semi-submersible carrier where only part of the conning tower runs above water, then surfaces to launch and receive aircraft.
Maybe some squids could get a job on one of those.
That is the USS Harry S Truman. F-14’s were still in use when it was commissioned.
Wow. Those are some really wide decks - and they extend down quite a ways.
OK,
thanks for proving my point. leaked CYA memos. the same spineless pentagon jockeys said the same thing about the nimitz, the f-16, the bradley, & etc, & etc.
They showed a tug behind it, and I could not believe how wide it looked. Wow, huge...
I don’t know it’s relative size, but it did look massive.
Ford was a coward in 1974-75 regarding our commitments to the South Vietnamese military and people. He simply decided to do nothing to stop the enemy, which would have been very simple since at the beginning of their Spring Offensive, their main forces were concentrated to the point that a few small nukes would have destroyed their offensive capabilities.
A few more nukes on the Ho Chi Minh trail and Route 1 would have taken care of the rest. See “Black April” for Order of Battle configurations, (by George “Jay” Veith).
Ford’s inaction gave us the slaughter in S.E. Asia, hundreds of thousands of refugees, Jimmy Carter, Iran and Nicaragua.
A nice guy, even brave in WW2, but when it counted in 1975, he was missing in action.
Oh, c’mon. No one who had any chance of being president was going to use nuclear weapons in Vietnam, not Goldwater, not Wallace, not Reagan and certainly not Ford. Plus Congress had already cut off funding for the war.
Using nukes in Nam would not have required any weapons expenses since we already had them. Ford could have declared a state of emergency and taken out Hanoi and the PAVN in a matter of hours.
Since Hanoi broke the Paris Peace Agreement of 1973, there were clauses allowing the US to help SVN repel invasions.
Goldwater would have used nukes in Nam. Wallace would never be president but he would have used them too. Reagan, probably. These guys wanted to “win”, not “retreat”.
Great leadership means having to make those great decisions that decide the fate of nations. Truman made them which is why I have a wife and grandchildren. Her father fought in the Pacific campaigns, 3 PHs, and knew he was going to die invading the mainland.
My father would have been shipped to Australia to ready our gas weapons if the Japanese had used theirs.
A late friend of mine, a medic, was on a ship midway in the Pacific heading for the invasion of Japan, when the big ones were dropped.
Millions of casualties were prevented by Truman’s “gut” move, and that is why many of us we born (and served in one way or the other in Vietnam, my son in Iraq and my new son-in-law in Serbia and Iraq).
Getting unnecessarily slaughtered on the ground when you have nukes you can justifiably use to end the war means that one’s leaders were cowards, esp. in SE Asia where Red China would not come in and the Russians couldn’t.
He was stationed on the aircraft carrier, the USS Monterey, CVL-26, and acted heroically when it was damaged during "Halsey's Typhoon". The typhoon caused fires below deck from loose airplanes. (My FIL was on a different carrier caught in the same typhoon.)
CF:
The US Navy's Newly Delivered Supercarrier Still Needs a Ton of Work
Why does it show a steam catapult vessel?
Why?
Phasers?
DBR, now under development by Raytheon
Development started in 1998. The Navy awarded the contract for the S-Band radar to Lockheed-Martin (aka RCA Moorestown, manufacturer of the SPY-1) and it has never worked right. But it has made a lot of people into six-sigma experts.
Why was CVN-70 named after Carl Vinson might be a better question. Ford served in the Navy in World War II, aboard the carrier CVL-26, USS Monterey and saw action in a number of engagements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford#Sea_duty
It certainly is. But all new design US Navy warships are massively increasing electricity generating capabilities. The two major factors are propulsion and beam weapons.
The times they are a changing!
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