Reply to post: Re: Spurious, Curious

Queen Elizabeth has a soggy bottom: No, the £3.1bn aircraft carrier, what the hell did you think we meant?

Jemma

Re: Spurious, Curious

Funny, but I'll believe that when I see it.

The Courageous was converted in three stages from a floating cock up with three 18" guns to a fairly useless carrier.

If I remember and it's a while, a flying off deck aft - then a landing deck was added forward - with the superstructure intact. And at that point people started dropping like nine pins because the turbulence caused by the superstructure (and the need to sideslip into the landing past it).

I have never seen a successfully introduced class of multi island carriers - the nearest being I think the refit lexingtons with a long low after superstructure extension to include the trunking for the large uptakes into one funnel - and wouldn't you know it they were trouble to land on according to "Winkle" Brown.

Any obstruction to an air flow causes turbulence - even a perfect aerofoil - and those two monstrosities are about as far away from smooth as Karen Gillan is from talented. They *will* interfere with air flow on virtually every aspect - which will cause issues simply because if you are making an approach into a carrier landing in borderline or even moderate level the very *last* thing you need is a bloody variable cross wind.

It'll be even more damn fun in a VTOL because as I understand it, and I might be wrong, the F35 doesn't have the same control finesse as the Harrier. So you throttle up and lift while in the lee of one of the islands and then drift into the area between the two with that nice strong cross deck wind that's been nicely channelled and concentrated between the two obstructions, what could possibly go wrong?

This has shitstorm written all over it - but all in all it's academic anyway. All the Russians for example have to do is record the sound signature of this floating disaster and put it into an acoustic seeker torpedo or three - or even an acoustic seeker nuclear torpedo and that's all she wrote.

It appears to have no really effective ship-to-bigger-than-a-small-clapped-out-repurposed-fishing-smack (aka Somali pirate ship) weapons and relying on the Darings is hardly a fantastic move - they're not exactly world class themselves - have they even been fitted with weapons yet?

This isn't so much a white elephant as an albino Paralititan with chronic arthritis and apparently incontinence to boot.

I hope I'm wrong but I don't think I am - 100 years of solid experience is usually a good marker of what not to do, and every advance that's been made in the design of carriers so far has shown that the smaller any obstructions the better. Almost every successive design has had a smaller island & superstructure or in extremity none at all.

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