[dragontamer]

> Carriers are the most important part of the US Navy. Their power projection and sea control capabilities are unmatched. Each one carries their own airborne radar squadron, as well as 44+ strike fighters to not only defend it but to strike back at their foes. The carrier allows the fleet to know everything that happens within 500 miles, and destroy anything that it doesn't want there.

Modern US Carriers are pretty absurd though. Do they really need 2 runways and 4 catapults?

I get it, in combat, you really want to launch your aircraft really fast. But it does show how building one-ship with 2x runways is considered better (by the US Navy anyway) than building 2x ships with 1x runways each.

There's a lot of decisions that went into the design of these ships. I'm not sure if they all made sense... it all comes down to what modern naval combat is (and frankly, no one really knows what modern naval combat is... there hasn't been a clash of major powers since WW2. Falklands War IMO doesn't count since Argentina isn't really the same kind of power as United Kingdom)

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I think everyone knows that our Carriers are vulnerable to enemies. But they're so useful for power projection that we keep building them...

[yuppie_scum]

You wouldn’t want to be in a holding pattern at bingo fuel while the one runway on the carrier has some problem preventing landing.

[azth]

Huh? US carriers only have 1 landing runway.

[simonh]

You’d have twice as many carriers though, so would generally have a second carrier (or more) in the battle group.

[dragontamer]

Nah, that's the benefit of the Supercarriers actually.

A typical carrier (Chinese Shandong) is 70,000 tons. The Gerald Ford Supercarrier is 100,000 tons.

So you can see that 3x regular carriers cost as much tons as 2x Supercarriers (210,000 tons vs 200,000 tons). But 2x supercarriers have 4-runways total and 8 catapults, while 3x carriers would only have 3-runways.

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The real problem with "Supercarriers" is that you've got all your eggs in one basket. Killing one supercarrier is kinda-sorta like killing two carriers, in terms of capabilities.

More efficient for the US Navy to use, but also more efficient for the enemy to kill.