• jabrd [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      That's what it would actually look like if the US military tried to make one of these things

      • BelovedOldFriend [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Something that uniform and smooth would actually have a relatively low radar cross section for something of that size. Meanwhile, the Zumwalt has plenty of greebling, for lack of a better word.

      • inshallah2 [none/use name]
        ·
        3 years ago

        And the slippery stealth ship project will only cost $100 billion even though the ship is detectable by radar and it's prone to sinking. Then the project will delayed and the cost will first balloon to $200 billion. The saga has just begun.

        • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
          ·
          3 years ago

          It'll run into problems when the demanded "VTOL drydocking capability" melts the hull and causes steam explosions to par-broil the crew.

          • inshallah2 [none/use name]
            ·
            3 years ago

            Melts the hull and causes steam explosions to par-broil the crew.

            An r/news redditor is ready with an explanation: "Minor technical issues are too be expected with brand new tech. And 'par-broil' is a gross exaggeration. Only one crewman had first degree burns and he's expected to probably survive."

            • KobaCumTribute [she/her]
              ·
              3 years ago

              Look, it's perfectly normal for a ship to flip upside and aggressively ram the sea floor during normal operations, happens all the time, nothing to make a big deal out of!

        • Vncredleader
          ·
          3 years ago

          You say that but the Zumwalt class legit is the F35 in boat form. They cannot even afford to buy ammo for it so now the few they have will need to get new turrets and/or change mission roles. Also broke in the fucking Panama Canal https://www.businessinsider.com/destroyer-zumwalts-big-guns-lack-ammo-and-navy-may-just-scrap-them-2018-11

    • happybadger [he/him]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      https://www.naval-technology.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2020/01/Image-2-Gerald-R.-Ford-class.jpg

      I used to watch carriers leave San Diego every weekend and couldn't tell this apart from a Nimitz-class at a glance. The island looks a little more modern/further back and the deck storage space might serve as a runway now. Shame we don't use CVNs as humanitarian platforms. They're amazing ships that can power and desalinate water for an entire city with a 25~ strong medical team, surgical facilities, and deck/hanger space for huge numbers of civilians.

        • happybadger [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          That's where they keep The Creature. We need a counter to hypersonic missiles.

        • EmmaGoldman [she/her, comrade/them]M
          ·
          3 years ago

          I think he means that it's difficult to tell the difference between the Ford class and Nimitz class carriers, as they're... Very similar.

      • ssjmarx [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        3 years ago

        Shame we don’t use CVNs as humanitarian platforms.

        Sending doctors around the world for no reason other than international solidarity? What are we, Cuba?

        Seriously though, the military has done some decent humanitarian work off of these in the past while dragging all of their war equipment with them. Take that shit off and make it a full time disaster relief ship.

        • happybadger [he/him]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Now instead imagine we used them to establish air superiority over countries without air forces, otherwise floating them as 6000-strong nuclear sarcophagi filled with carcinogens.

          The USS Mercy/Comfort were the only two ships I would have liked to be stationed on but corpsmen couldn't get orders to them so much as we could west coast hospitals that rotated staff on them. With climate change mainly hitting coastal cities it'd be neat to avoid another Hurricane Katrina where the ground hospitals are so overwhelmed that doctors have to go into mass casualty triage mode. A thousand-bed floating hospital could do a lot of good if we weren't a terrorist empire.

    • ButtBidet [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Seriously. I look forward to China's new ballistic anti-ship missiles sinking this turd.

    • Dingdangdog [he/him,comrade/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      Ironically something like this is next to useless against poor farmers lol.

      I mean unless we start adopting blitzkrieg tactics, which is possible I guess.

      Can throw as much money at the problem as you want for the most part, we're still going to get owned in land wars in unfamiliar territory.

      All this is just overcompensation for our inability to handle that lol

      • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
        ·
        3 years ago

        Ironically something like this is next to useless against poor farmers lol.

        It's a great launch platform from which to harass and murder East African locals until they turn over all their fishing rights to a US owned fleet.

        Also handy for establishing an embargo against rebellious Caribbean island nations.

        But its glorified target practice for a modern navy.

  • anaesidemus [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Naming it after FORD??? He didn't even win an election! (such as they are in the US)

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      edit-2
      3 years ago

      I believe he famously earmarked a bunch of them back when he was Speaker.

  • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I find it hilarious the US keeps doubling down on the world's largest floating coffins even now that it's abundantly obvious its carriers would be at the bottom of the ocean in the first week of conflict with anyone bigger and more industrialized than Syria. Obviously it's because the navy exists just to defend capital's interests by keeping trade lanes open and bombing anyone who doesn't eagerly hand over their natural resources, but you'd think they'd at least realize they're not the sole hegemon anymore.

      • DefinitelyNotAPhone [he/him]
        ·
        3 years ago

        They're enormous slow-moving targets that light up radar/sonar real big, and ballistic missiles are accurate enough to hit them and cheap enough to build and launch hundreds if not thousands at an individual carrier and still be cost-effective. Any modern industrialized nation has the capabilities to produce at least a few waves of ship-killing missiles that can be fired from land and casually overwhelm whatever meager anti-missile defenses a carrier group might have, at which point your $10 billion carrier carrying another few billion dollars worth of planes, fuel, personnel, etc is now at the bottom of the ocean.

          • BelovedOldFriend [he/him]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            sigh

            The threat of ASBMs is greatly overstated in leftist circles who (rightly) eagerly await the end of US dominance. The technology is entirely untested and unproven. American anti-ballistic missile defenses have been more thoroughly-tested (with not-great results!), but they have been shown to actually work on occasion. This has, to our knowledge, never occurred with an ASBM. And the question of how the warhead will receive targeting updates for it's moving, maneuvering target while it is undergoing re-entry (and will be entirely blind in its frontal aspect due to the plasma shield from re-entry) remains an unanswered question. Theories exists, but we're back to "unproven and untested".

            If the aircraft carrier was dead, China wouldn't be building new ones.

            • s0ykaf [he/him]
              ·
              3 years ago

              If the aircraft carrier was dead, China wouldn’t be building new ones.

              i don't know who's the right one here, but in either case carriers would still be useful against many non-NATO countries

            • IlIlIlIlIlIlIl [any]
              ·
              edit-2
              3 years ago

              If the aircraft carrier was dead, China wouldn’t be building new ones.

              Aircraft carriers (like battleships in the past) are essentially status symbols of navies. Just like how a navy in the past wouldn't have been taken seriously without at least possessing a fleet of battleships, a navy of today would not be taken seriously without at least possessing a fleet of carriers. This does not mean that they are practical, the previous status symbol, the battleship was proven obsolete by the carrier. The carrier may soon be proven obsolete by the surface-to-surface missile, but that does not reduce its present status.

              If China had nothing but a massive spam fleets of corvettes, would its navy be taken seriously?

              It's like how America and the Soviet Union competed over who could make the largest nuclear bomb, the Americans testing a 10MT nuclear bomb (Castle Bravo) and the Soviets testing a 50MT nuclear bomb (Tsar Bomba). Neither were practical, and both were expensive and ultimately a waste of time and money. The creation of these bombs were a pure flex to the opposing power. No target on Earth would ever require a 10MT, 50Mt, or god forbid a 100MT (full-size Tsar Bomba) nuclear bomb to destroy. It is purely flexing.

              China building these ships is not a question of effectiveness but merely a signal to the public and to foreign powers that China has a great navy and will not be bullied around anymore. Carriers are the ultimate symbol of naval power and dominance, of course China is going to build them.

              • BelovedOldFriend [he/him]
                ·
                edit-2
                3 years ago

                may soon be proven obsolete

                You fundamentally agree with what I've said when you say this. It is not yet---or at least has not yet been proven to be---obsolete. Claims of the death of the carrier as a concept are premature.

                • IlIlIlIlIlIlIl [any]
                  ·
                  edit-2
                  3 years ago

                  I am simply offering an alternate explanation for the building of aircraft carriers, nothing more. And the battleship wasn't obsolete - until it was.

                  • BelovedOldFriend [he/him]
                    ·
                    3 years ago

                    Fair.

                    I think China is not really in a place where it can afford to develop and build such a large, expensive status symbol if that status symbol was not also thought to be an effective tool for defense.

              • Vncredleader
                ·
                3 years ago

                Carriers for China also represent the ability to produce ships like that themselves, which for decades they haven't been able to. Their first carrier was a Soviet hull, sold for scrap to iirc Poland, bought by a Chinese firm secretly and transported undercover to be worked on. Making their own is more of an engineering exercise than anything

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      Hard to say how any actual war would play out until it actually happened.

      Iraq was supposed to have the fifth largest military on earth until we ran over then like a speed bump in Desert Storm. Admitted, they also sucked it up against Iran a decade earlier.

      But just because the US sucks doesn't mean the people we end up fighting don't also suck. If we actually threw down against Russia, it would be a collosal shit show not seen since the Korean War.

        • Totalscrotalimplosio [he/him,any]
          ·
          3 years ago

          Oh no I thought you meant the missiles it was firing. I don't know shit about missile prices, but maybe it'd be enough if it was in the right place?

          • Lil_Revolitionary [she/her,they/them]
            ·
            edit-2
            3 years ago

            I was going for the "meme" that aircraft carriers are incompatible with modern war, a state with a half-competent military could destroy them with a barrage of relatively cheap missiles, something that America refuses to acknowledge because of the military industrial complex. The Radio War Nerd podcast talks about this, particularly with regards to potential conflict with Iran

            Edit: for example, here's an article about a censored military exercise where a 30 year old french sub (theoretically) sinks an aircraft carrier. We only use them because they're really big and look cool

            • Vncredleader
              ·
              3 years ago

              A Swedish sub did something similar https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/war-games-swedish-stealth-submarine-sank-us-aircraft-carrier-116216

  • GreenTeaRedFlag [any]
    ·
    3 years ago

    That red glow on the inside is the souls trapped to power the ship. They still use petroleum-based fuels, the tortured spirits are just a back up.

  • toledosequel [none/use name]
    ·
    3 years ago

    The "pride of the country" lol. When I pop out at Walmart it's definetely "US Carrier Fleet" shirts I see!

  • SoyViking [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    Hopes that the appointment of Joseph Biden to the role of supreme leader of US America would lead to a thaw in the hardline policy of the ruling Republican-Democrat Party has been disproven as the former British colony's regime continues to ignore the suffering of its people and spends all the money on the military instead of feeding its own population.

    • kota [he/him]
      ·
      3 years ago

      only thing it's thawing is the fuckin polar ice caps

    • Totalscrotalimplosio [he/him,any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      But it's too on the fucking nose, right? Like, let's take a super star destroyer and just put it in the ocean. Complete with red lights and some obscure tridentish symbol.

    • zifnab25 [he/him, any]
      ·
      3 years ago

      We're a few appropriation cycles shy of building an actual death star, complete with exhaust shaft that causes the whole fucking thing to explode.