Posted on May 21, 2017
Battlecarrier: The U.S. Navy's Dream of Merging a Battleship and an Aircraft Carrier
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Any thoughts shipmates?
Battlecarrier: The U.S. Navy's Dream of Merging a Battleship and an Aircraft Carrier
Posted from nationalinterest.org
Naval/Maritime History
Defense
Future
Posted >1 y ago
Responses: 5
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I've always wondered why the Navy didn't do something like this. Everyone thinks that Carriers are huge, and they are. But in the world of big ships, they don't even make a blip on the radar. I have personally sailed on ships 3, 4 times their size, by deadweight tonnage. And those ships all have crews of 22-30 people My point? The Navy could easily make a 200k DWT dreadnaught that had thick armor, huge guns, and the ability to launch and recover aircraft, and launch missiles. The engineering is possible. No one's going to put only 30 people on a ship like that, but with all the automation today? 1k-1.5k Sailors could do it. Sadly, this will never happen.
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SN Greg Wright
LT Brad McInnis - It's nearly all automated. The bridge team (typically 3 people underway) mostly just stands around and monitors the helm (on autopilot), and the radars and other equipment. Same for the engine room. Pretty much only go hands-on entering or leaving port, loading or discharging, or if something happens at sea to require it (fuckwit fishing boat drivers that want a closer look to something they have no idea just how much water is being pushed, etc). While you wouldn't want that 100% of the time in the Navy, there isn't any reason it wouldn't be fine for the 99.99% of the time you're not going to be in combat. And it seems maybe the Navy is coming to that realization: ie, the Zumwalt crew which is only something like 160 Sailors on a ship larger than a cruiser (how they classified the Z as a DDG is beyond me), which is less than half of the manning on the CG's. So perhaps there's hope.
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LT Brad McInnis
SN Greg Wright - Yeah, the Navy coming around is SLOOOOW! Kinda like a supertanker turning or stopping! Have a great week buddy!
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SCPO Joshua I
The DDG-1000 has to be classified as a DDG, because the law as it's written right now requires all new CGs to be nukes, and we're not building any more nuke CGs.
Manning of civilian ships is completely irrelevant to US Navy manning.
If the mission of the ship is "move from point A to point B", as with a modern supertanker, then a bare minimum manning necessary to check on the engines and watch the VMS is perfectly fine.
That's not the mission of any Navy warship. If you have to go to war, you need a ship's company that can man spaces, keep electronics running, launch and recover aircraft, track and classify everything around the ship, keep weapon systems running, load, unload, reload weapon systems, do damage control, etc. etc. etc.
A CVN running with 3600 people is badly undermanned. You need eight hundred people just to run the flight deck alone.
Manning of civilian ships is completely irrelevant to US Navy manning.
If the mission of the ship is "move from point A to point B", as with a modern supertanker, then a bare minimum manning necessary to check on the engines and watch the VMS is perfectly fine.
That's not the mission of any Navy warship. If you have to go to war, you need a ship's company that can man spaces, keep electronics running, launch and recover aircraft, track and classify everything around the ship, keep weapon systems running, load, unload, reload weapon systems, do damage control, etc. etc. etc.
A CVN running with 3600 people is badly undermanned. You need eight hundred people just to run the flight deck alone.
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SN Greg Wright
SCPO Joshua I - I wasn't trying to draw any correlation, Senior. My one and only point was to illustrate that the tech to run large ships with smaller crews already exists. Which I was using to justify in this 'what if' scenario, my contention that the fictional dreadnaught I mentioned could conceivably be manned by far smaller crews than current CVNs are. I made no connection between this scenario and the real-world Navy.
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LTC (Join to see)
Looks great on paper, but it always comes back to one thing. Enough properly trained Sailors to man such a ship, and being able to retain said highly trained Sailors.
Looks great on paper, but it always comes back to one thing. Enough properly trained Sailors to man such a ship, and being able to retain said highly trained Sailors.
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I don't see a mission for it. It would be awesome to see one. But, the problem comes down to manning and mission. We don't have enough sailors to fully man the ships we do have, and the main mission of the battleships was either shore bombardment or sinking other ships. We can do the shore bombardment with longer range 5" rounds. As far as sinking other ships, the battleships were like big Mike Tysons or Muhammed Alis running around sinking other ships. Great at the time, but now we have a bunch of Manny Pacquiaos...
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