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US Navy set off a 40k-pound explosive to test its new supercarrier
- mikece 5y agoShock tests: dramatic to view from the outside but ESSENTIAL to make sure you know how a ship will respond to concussion. There are a couple of large-type nuclear reactors on that ship and if a sudden jolt would cause the cooling loop to rupture it's better to know that now than in battle. Granted, the reactors are (or at least WERE) massively over-engineered so these exercises are more about all of the rest of ship's systems coping with a close-aboard concussion without electrical or communications blackouts from ruptured systems and connections.
- remarkEon 5y agoWhat happens to that reactor if it's damaged (or destroyed) in battle? I guess what I'm asking is: what are the failure modes we're talking about?
- dflock 5y agoI means that someone's destroyed a USN super carrier, so the world has bigger problems to worry about?
- nexuist 5y agoIt depends on where exactly the ship is when the reactor is damaged, but in general water is actually pretty good at containing radiation so my guess is that some wildlife will die or get cancer but it won't have long term effects like Fukushima did because the ship will sink and kill the core before it melts down, if it even melts down in the first place. Regardless, it won't really matter, since sinking a US aircraft carrier probably means nuclear war.
- coolspot 5y ago> since sinking a US aircraft carrier probably means nuclear war. USSR/Russian strategy against air carrier groups are nuclear torpedoes (launched from subs) and swarming nuclear cruise missles diving underwater some last mile before impact (launched from ships/subs/coast/heavy bombers). Also don’t need to hit precisely - miss by couple hundred meters will do too.
- nexuist 5y agoRight, if we've got nukes in the water, who cares about what the on-board reactor is going to do. Whatever happens is certainly not going to be pretty.
- wbl 5y agoThe reactor has a larger fission product and transuranic inventory. It is the more dangerous one over an intermediate timescale after the short lived induced radiation goes away.
- swarnie_ 5y ago> since sinking a US aircraft carrier probably means nuclear war. Nice to know the US mentality hasn't budged an inch in 75 years. Please don't nuke the rest of us because you lost a dick waiving contest.
- reducesuffering 5y agoHave you forgotten why a US military was necessary just 75 years ago to save the UK from destruction? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Sea_Lion
- Cymrukicks 5y agoTerrible choice of battle, One that the UK won handily of its own ingenuity and cunning as stated in the wikipedia.
- reducesuffering 5y agoMy point was not about US involvement in a specific battle but that of Nazi Germany's clear intent to invade the UK, likely only eventually abated by US involvement.
- mthoms 5y agoCheck your timeline. The US wasn’t even in the war then. Though American help was instrumental later in the war, the UK actually saved itself from invasion (with help from fellow Commonwealth nations). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Britain
- reducesuffering 5y agoMy point was not about US involvement in a specific battle but that of Nazi Germany's clear intent to invade the UK, likely only eventually abated by US involvement. Like you said, the UK saved itself (for now), but "American help was instrumental later."
- solatic 5y ago> sinking a US aircraft carrier probably means nuclear war Remind me again what the geopolitical consequences were of the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Cole_bombing Sinking a US aircraft carrier (especially if by proxy rather than uniformed military) probably means some strong statements and some court cases.
- flohofwoe 5y agoBlowing a hole in the side of a destroyer in harbor is hardly comparable to sinking an aircraft carrier.
- nexuist 5y agoDid you forget the part where we went to war for 20 years and tore the entire region to shreds? Do Iraq, Afghanistan, or Sudan remotely resemble functional sovereign states after US intervention? What about the thousands of drone strikes and hundreds of thousands dead? I would not describe our intervention in the Middle East as "some strong statements and some court cases."
- solatic 5y agoThat wasn't in response to the USS Cole bombing. Don't conflate that with 9/11.
- nexuist 5y ago9/11 was not an isolated incident and was the culmination of nearly a decade of damaged ME relations. If you'll remember, Desert Storm had been 10 years before, and Al Qaeda had bombed the WTC 8 years before. It was 9/11 that forced the US's hand, but it was not only 9/11 that justified their choice.
- bell-cot 5y agoAnother example of why this sort of testing is important - without pressing the "because nuclear" emotional button: In WWII, Germany's new "pride of the Third Reich" battleship, Bismark, had her main radar equipment disabled during her first major battle. The cause? Concussion from firing her own guns. You'd think they'd have designed for and tested that, but... (Your friendly, local WWII naval warfare enthusiast - or a few well-chosen YouTube contributors - can cite many, many more cases where shock/concussion damage was a painful or fatal surprise for the crew of a ship. Especially in battle, damage to important ship systems or structures tends to cascade rapidly out of control.)
- stygiansonic 5y agoHistorically somewhat related: The underwater shot Baker test of Operation Crossroads in 1946 which tested the effects of an underwater nuclear blast on obsolete warships some of which were captured Japanese and German ones from WWII: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Crossroads
- driscoll42 5y agoAnd if you want, you can go dive the wrecks of those ships at Bikini Atoll. It's on my bucket list: https://thedirtydozenexpeditions.com/bikini-atoll-wrecks https://thedirtydozenexpeditions.com/bikini-atoll-wrecks (for one example) But it's about $10000
- Nursie 5y agoHow much ocean life did that wipe out I wonder?
- refurb 5y agoLots. But only 0.0000001% of the ocean was affected.
- kajecounterhack 5y agoLife is not evenly distributed throughout the ocean, so it's possible it had little effect if the location was chosen wisely (away from structure, in wide open water). Not that I think they chose wisely, the US military tends to not care about stuff like that :/
- Retric 5y agoYou don’t exactly put aircraft carriers in shallow water, so this blast is unlikely to have done much to any appreciable amount of ocean life.
- TheSpiceIsLife 5y agoThe Nimitz class carriers have a draft of 11.3m and can navigate the Suez Canal, the Gerald R. Ford class carriers have a draft of 12m so I assume they could too. The Suez Canal has a minimum depth of 12m at low tide. USS Nimitz navigating Suez: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HOjxu8nB8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_HOjxu8nB8
- pdonis 5y agoThe fact that carriers can navigate the Suez canal does not mean they can do anything else while they're doing it. A carrier in the Suez canal will be moving very slowly and all other operations besides navigating the ship and keeping its power and engines running will be shut down. Carriers operate in deep water. The only times they are in shallow water are coming into or leaving port, or transiting a canal like the Suez in order to get somewhere.
- aaaxyz 5y agoMisleading title.
- slipframe 5y ago> US Navy set off a 40k-pound explosive to test its new supercarrier How is that misleading? Isn't that exactly what they did?
- teakettle42 5y agoThe title was previously "US Navy set off a 40k-pound explosive on its new supercarrier". They did not, in fact, destroy a brand new supercarrier by setting off a 40k-pound explosive on it :-)
- throw0101a 5y ago"On" is a flexible word: > preposition, 1c. —used as a function word to indicate position in close proximity with: a village on the sea; stay on your opponent * https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/on
- pdonis 5y agoMost words are "flexible" and you have to take them in context to choose which of multiple possible meanings is most appropriate. In the case of explosive weapons, "on" usually means that the object of the preposition is the point of impact, as in "dropping bombs on target X".
- IntrepidWorm 5y agoTL:DR; The phrase "A bird dropped a large splat on my head" generally implies a much more upsetting prospect than simply "A bird dropped a large splat in my general vicinity."
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- trhway 5y agoa bit related - typically the outer layer of the underwater part of the hull of large navy ships consists of a gun silencer/car muffler style structures several meters wide to dampen the direct hit explosion of a torpedo or similar scale munition.
- barsonme 5y agoAircraft carrier size baffles. That’s crazy!
- jabl 5y agoIs this true for modern warships? WWII era capital ships had torpedo blisters to protect against hits, but AFAIK modern torpedoes don't work by blowing a hole in the side of the hull, but rather detonate under the keel. And the huge gas bubble formed by the detonation breaks the keel.
- granzymes 5y ago> The ongoing shock trials, which the Navy was ordered to carrier out before the Ford could deploy I wonder if that was intentional.
- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y agoNot quite a full ship shock trial but there are lots of videos for MIL 901 shock testing online. The barge test is my favorite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swAWpmboN64 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=swAWpmboN64
- throwawaysea 5y agoHere’s the video: https://youtu.be/ziVUumtxNuU https://youtu.be/ziVUumtxNuU My biggest concern is how much marine life this affected. In Seattle marine construction projects (like piers) are required to implement various mitigation’s like bubble screens to limit shockwaves and sound from traveling, because they’ve found that even just a pile driver can kill fish half a mile away. This explosion is much, much bigger and I assume its shockwave and sound travel hundreds of miles, especially since it apparently set off seismometers and registered a 3.9 on the Richter scale.
- doodlebugging 5y agoThis would be detectable a long ways away from the source. Acoustic energy like this attenuates slowly. In marine seismic exploration for oil and gas we use airgun source arrays that develop about 1000-2000 psi. You can watch your hydrophone array and see other crews operating tens of miles away and in the past, before source separation techniques allowed processing of data from surveys where simultaneous acquisition was occurring in close proximity, crews worked together to avoid having their data step on the other party's data so they operated withing time windows to minimize interference. Nowadays with very precise clocks and event timing down to the gnat's ass fraction of a second it is less necessary since records can be correlated between source sensors and remote receivers with extreme accuracy. An event that registers as a 3.9 earthquake on a land seismometer far from the source tells you nothing about the energy near the source. That wave traveled thru the water column and into the sediments on the seafloor then into the crust beneath before being recorded at distant stations. It suffered attenuation at each interface due to Snell's Law. Some is transmitted, the rest is reflected across each impedance boundary. The true measure of the energy of this event comes from the near-field hydrophones. I bet they don't release that data. With that you could determine how loud it was at the source. Water doesn't attenuate acoustic signals very well though they do reflect at internal temperature and salinity interfaces. Navies take advantage of this lack of attenuation in their subsea communication strategies which allow communication over huge distances through subsurface water layers. Interesting stuff. This event will show up on seismic records from hydrophones as a broadband signal with a large bubble pulse and multiple collapse peaks. The initial blast creates a huge bubble that collapses back in on itself and re-forms and collapses several times reverberating. It is huge and will affect marine life many miles from the test location. It would be interesting to see a decibel graph of the energy and power spectrum. Even though modern seismic surveys are timed to avoid important seasons for known marine life there is no way to minimize the impact this will have on marine life that is currently nearby and "out of season" or out of the public eye. I mentioned to a fellow geophysicist that submarine echo sounders were likely the cause of marine mammal beachings and this person, a PhD in Geophysics, told me that I was wrong because he had studied the issue for the industry and the energy from those tests was too low, the wrong bandwidth, etc. He said he would buy me lunch and show me the data to back that up. I'm glad I have had the means to purchase my own lunch since that offer was made.
- ironfootnz 5y agoJudging by the picture of the explosion and doing my trigonometry calculations, it was 2.3 miles away from the explosion.
- Animats 5y agoOh, they finally got that done. That was supposed to be done back in 2019, before the next carrier in the Ford class (CVN-79, the Kennedy) was launched. They're still having problems with the electromagnetic launch system. Not, apparently, in the catapult itself, but in the system that powers it. Which is a big flywheel/generator thing. Output is about a megawatt, comparable to the highest performance Tesla cars. The thing was designed about 15 years ago, before high-power electric car technology was widely available, so it's all custom. The next generation of this will probably be built using off the shelf electric auto parts. Probably on the PLAN's Type 003 aircraft carrier, scheduled for launch next year.
- pmcollins 5y agoSounds like power output is more like 100Mw. > Each three-second launch can consume as much as 100 million watts of electricity, about as much as a small town uses in the same amount of time. “A utility does that using an acre of equipment,” says lab engineer Mike Doyle, but due to shipboard space limitations, “we have to take that and fit it into a shoebox.” In shipboard generators developed for electromagnetic catapults, electrical power is stored kinetically in rotors spinning at 6,400 rpm. When a launch order is given, power is pulled from the generators in a two- to three-second pulse https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-things-work-electromagnetic-catapults-14474260/ https://www.airspacemag.com/military-aviation/how-things-wor...
- Animats 5y agoYou're closer than I was. A maximum-load launch consumes 121 megajoules, which is 121 megawatt-seconds. Catapult launches take about 2s, so they need 60MW or so.
- yread 5y agoMakes sense, F16 is about 5-10 times heavier than model S and it needs to go in 2s from 0 not to 100 but to 200km/h
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- thehappypm 5y agoA funny thing about modern military theory is that drills and tests like these have helped ensure that another major world war will happen again, and why major world conflict abruptly dropped to 0 in the 1940s. So yes, these tests probably aren't great for the environment, but these things directly prevent thousands of bombs being dropped in World War 3.
- justinator 5y agoI honestly think having several thousand nuclear warheads still pointed at various targets is what's really stopping WWIII. Aircraft carriers are sitting ducks in any major conflict and they know it. They're fine if your adversary is working a level or two above the stone age, which is the type of wars we've been fighting.
- scottLobster 5y agoSitting ducks? You have any idea how hard it is to find a carrier if you don't already know where to look? The ocean is a pretty big place, carriers move pretty quickly, and spy satellites only have a relatively narrow cone of view with enough resolution to detect one from orbit. Even if you found one visually, guiding a missile to accurately strike a moving carrier is extremely difficult. It's one reason China's much touted "carrier killer" missiles are less of a threat than the Chinese would like. While they could theoretically sink a carrier they rely on a complex system of satellites and radar to guide a missile in, disruption of any one piece of that system (remember the US has successfully tested anti-satellite weapons) and you won't be scoring any hits. Never mind the multi-layered missile defense systems that all carrier battle groups run with, which wouldn't be a guarantee but would have a chance. The most those missiles would is force the carriers to stay further away from the Chinese coast, which given the range of modern aircraft isn't that much of a burden if we're talking sea control. As for naval combat, there's no combination of ships in any country's Navy that can hope to stand up to the US Navy in a protracted conflict. US carriers have undisputed rule of the seas for at least the next three decades, even against the likes of China/Russia.
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- 1024core 5y agoI wonder how many fish died? And do they do anything to try and minimize the death toll of the sea creatures?
- turkeytotal 5y agothey drop pamphlets in the water, of course
- IntrepidWorm 5y agoUnderrated comment.
- swader999 5y agoHopefully there's a way to scare the whales and other larger ones away prior too.
- deepsun 5y agoYes, making loud noises. Dolphin savers do that by banging steel tubes in the water, so dolphins swim away from the Japanese kill squads.
- gooseus 5y agoI think the larger amount of damage is done to the marine mammals, sea turtles, and other animals that are sensitive to sound waves. The real damage isn't from the actual explosion per se, but from the massive sound wave which propagates far from the site underwater[1]. That assessment is discussing explosions much smaller than the one the Navy just did (and is scheduled to do twice again). I'd like to believe to do something to mitigate the damage, but I don't know what they could possibly do for something this violent. [1] https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/deepwaterhorizon/adminrecord/upload/Draft-Assessment-and-Mitigation-of-Marine-Explosives-Guidance-for-Protected-Species-in-the-Southeast-U-S-Version-1-prepared-by-Kyle-Baker-NMFS-February-2008.pdf https://www.doi.gov/sites/doi.gov/files/migrated/deepwaterho...
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- noisy_boy 5y agoWondering how much of that is actual test and how much is posturing in context of South China Sea pass-throughs.. "this is the bomb we have to use just to test because, you know, our ships are that strong..."
- robinj6 5y agoAny idea of the budget for a test like this?
- barsonme 5y agoI think when you’re doing things on an aircraft-carrier scale the budget is usually, “yes.”
- dmurray 5y agoA carrier group costs around $7 million per day including upfront investment and operating costs [0]. Military high explosive costs around $100/kg, or $2m for a bomb this size. [1] So, somewhat surprisingly to me, this operation was not just a rounding error in the daily budget. [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20140813034340/http://www.cnas.org/files/documents/publications/CNAS%20Carrier_Hendrix_FINAL.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20140813034340/http://www.cnas.o... [1] https://newatlas.com/cl-20-high-power-military-explosive/24059/ https://newatlas.com/cl-20-high-power-military-explosive/240...
- tristanb 5y agoCool - fuck the whales so we can test our war machine. This is stupid.
- s5300 5y agoErr, I guess you'd be repulsed at what some society's did to make sure they had enough oil to light their lamps back in the day...
- ALittleLight 5y agoOr the fact that Japan still hunts whales.
- austhrow743 5y agoCanada hunts over twice as many whales as Japan. The US almost as much as Japan. Plenty of other countries putting up big numbers as well. Weird to single out Japan when the article isn't about Japan.
- mthoms 5y agoFor context, whaling in Canada is entirely done by indigenous peoples using (more or less) traditional methods. Japanese whaling is industrial/commercial in nature (even though it’s performed under the guise of “research”).
- marton78 5y agoGreat argument. You know what people also used to do in the past? Rape and pillage. Let's do that, too! Hey, there's also historical precedent for slavery. Let's reintroduce it!
- gscott 5y agoIf any whales surface to the top upside down they collect them and cook them up. Cycle of life.
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- c_o_n_v_e_x 5y agoFor those worried about sea life, it looks like the Navy have SOPs in place for shock trials to prevent/minimize harm to marine mammals and sea turtles https://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/Shock20Trials_46705.pdf https://www.whoi.edu/cms/files/Shock20Trials_46705.pdf
- beebeepka 5y agoThey have an array of underwater beacons. They don't care about animals or anything else that does not help them take whatever they want at any given moment