• 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.

    • 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.

      • 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.