All the world's aircraft carriers

[homerdog]

Back in the dark ages of the 80s the Nimitz class carrier group (a carrier has a ton of support ships) cost $1 Trillion. Scrap building one group and invest $1T into economic incubation in the Middle East and you just might be a bit more for your money.

Something is not computing since the entire defense budget for 2011 is about $1 trillion.

But I digress; I didn't post this in RPSC because I didn't want it to turn into a discussion of defense budgets.

 

[Mize]

right-o. Got it.

When was the last Nimitz class built anyway?

 

[homerdog]

The George H. W. Bush was commissioned in January last year according to wiki, and it is the last Nimitz.

 

[zed]

what would you do with the extra $65 ?

true we'll prolly just spend it on bailing out your economy

 

[banksie]

AFAIKS this is the only fighter aircraft the nz airforce has

no wonder the nz airforce is the terror of the pacific

Not entirely true, I believe we still have those Skyhawks sitting in mothballs somewhere. Of course we probably don't have the pilots to fly them anymore...

 

[Grall]

Ol' Howie wasn't a particulary good president, nor is he dead, and they still name a carrier after him? Oye vey, standards have declined in the US navy!

Anyway, what could they possibly need 6.something k crew for just to run the ship, isn't some like...troops being transported in or out or something? It's hard to imagine even fitting that many people inside those ships - sure they're long, and pretty wide too, but there's lots of hangar space under deck too... Must be hella cramped crew quarters for sure!

 

[tongue_of_colicab]

Well I suppose numbers go up quite quick. You need command, deck crew, probably a ton of mechanics, you got about 90 planes and each hour of flying means 10 hours of taking them apart and putting them back together again. Than you need people to take care of the ship itself, people to take care of the other people and number all the people by atleast *2 because its a 24/7 operation and you will probably end up with a 5, 6000 crew fast.

 

[zed]

Must be hella cramped crew quarters for sure!

Speaking as a former yacht owner (I still retain the title captain ) the things have much more space when youre inside than they look from the outside, like the tardis.
something 300m long is huge, think wembley stadium length

 

[hoom]

Indeed, amazing how many people you can fit into a surprisingly small dimension.
eg take a relatively small 36m cube & divide it up into 2m sub-cubes, how many do you have?
5,832

 

[homerdog]

Speaking as a former yacht owner (I still retain the title captain ) the things have much more space when youre inside than they look from the outside, like the tardis.
something 300m long is huge, think wembley stadium length

The link in the op states that each big American carrier is roughly the size of the Empire State Building.