CVN-65 is a special case since it is originally designed for conventional power, but later switched out its boilers by nuclear reactors one by one. Having eight nuclear reactors on a single ship makes for ridiculous speeds, but is way overkill and the sky high costs caused all sister ships to be cancelled.
00X/004 future nuclear CATOBAR carrier thread
- Thread starter AETHER
- Start date
The Maersk Boston and Beaumont have a very unusual hull shapes for cargo ships, almost cruiser-like, so they are probably narrower than your usual cargo or carrier hull.?
Alaska class cruiser
| Length |
|
| Beam | 91 ft 9.375 in (28.0 m) |
| Draft | 27 ft 1 in (8.26 m) (mean) 31 ft 9.25 in (9.68 m) (maximum) |
lcloo
Captain
The tear drop dynamic hull shape of aircraft carrier at waterline is designed for fast speed like racing sailboats or the old timer battleships/battle cruisers, contrary to the believe that it has straight fat flat bottom like a large bulk carrier..
Note that racing sailboats can achieved 30 to 50 knots.
To launch a heavy aircraft you would like to have a favourable strong head wind, fast ship speed plus the power of the catapult, a greater lift for launched aircraft can be achieved if you have fast ship speed and strong head wind even if it is ski ramp launch.
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Sailboats achieve up to 50 knots by using hydrofoils to lift the boat out of the water so it is only limited by air resistance. Do you happen to see any of those implements on carriers? Can you please stop with this nonsense?
First is that carriers are required to be able to conduct 0 windspeed launches. Second, a good head wind is significantly more than 10 kn difference and, most important, extremely cheap to achieve. You just turn the ship around. To go from 30 to 40 knot is more than doubling the resistance and thus required power. That means a less space for munitions and fuel (for your escorts). It also means more space required for machinery. You then need to also look into getting much larger propellers to reduce tip speeds and work the much larger props into the clearance. Not to mention it can't be used in any other scenario because none of your escorts can reach that speed.
By the way, when talking about the fineness of a ship, we use block coefficients and prismatic coefficient's, not length, beam and drafts. It doesn't really matter what the outer dimensions are if you have a Cb of 0.9 for example. You will move like a turd.
The Maersk Boston likely has a Cb of around 0.44-0.47 which is less than some WW2 destroyers. That's entering semi-planning territory of fineness. Even then the actual speed of the ship was 29 kn, and 37 kn is only the maximum - which I highly suspect is only under the most ideal conditions (glassy water, lightship only, freshly cleaned) - just like the French speed records. For comparison, the Nimitz ships are probably around 0.69 which is close to the old battleships.
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