4 ms·

I'm curious how the weather of the sea affects military naval operations. How can an aircraft carrier launch and recover planes if it's being rocked by waves?

I'm curious how the weather of the sea affects military naval operations. How can an aircraft carrier launch and recover planes if it's being rocked by waves? How can a destroyer launch missiles from vertical launch cells if waves are constantly crashing on the deck? I wonder how a Navy made up entirely of nuclear submarines would fare against a more diverse force with an equal number of hulls.

vkou 4y ago
Submarines won't do the coastal bombardment and air strikes and escort and reconnaissance work that regular navies are capable of.
- scrumper 4y ago
  Well they do some of that: reconnaissance both electronic and visual, coastal bombardment (and air strikes) with cruise missiles, and they can land very small groups of special forces too. Not to the extent surface ships can but if suddenly something made surface warfare impossible, submarines could take over a chunk of it. And you can imagine easily how drones might be embarked on a submarine and launched like cruise missiles.
  - JumpCrisscross 4y ago
    > coastal bombardment (and air strikes) with cruise missiles Submarine-launched missiles, in a diverse navy, can launch from underwater. That's great for stealth. It's terrible for budget. A submarine-only fleet would need to surface to economically attempt coastal bombardment and air defence. That said, I'm not sure what fraction of e.g. the U.S. Navy's submarine missiles are capable of subsurface dispatchment.
MarkMarine 4y ago
Aircraft carriers are gigantic and are designed to be stable. I’ve never been on the largest ones, but as a Marine I was on the Essex (a smaller carrier for jump jets and helicopters) and we sailed basically directly through a typhoon. The ship was pretty stable, pitching about 10 degrees from side to side. Enough to make some experienced sailors toss their lunch, and even if there was no wind, I think it would have been very treacherous to do flight ops with the deck pitching like that. For fixed wing jets that need to land on deck… even if you ignored the wind that goes along with these conditions, I think recovering aircraft would be too great a risk. That does bring up the wind and visibility that (almost always) goes along with these extreme sea states, which would be probably just as hazardous as the deck pitching about to flight ops. For basically everything else, I think the naval systems work just fine in bad weather. In regards to rogue waves, an 85 foot wave would put green water on the flight deck of the carrier I was on, something that would be difficult to imagine for me. Aircraft on the flight deck are chained down with multiple chains, each of the chains having the strength to hold the entire aircraft down, so I can’t imagine losing aircraft, but flooding the planes with sea water probably wouldn’t be good for them.
- worik 4y ago
  > Aircraft carriers are gigantic and are designed to be stable The ocean is bigger. It is only a matter of time until one is lost The ocean is the boss of sailors, a loving but harsh mistress.
  - MarkMarine 4y ago
    There have been plenty of aircraft carriers sunk, not sure what your point is.
- TylerE 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra 3 destroyers sank, with almost 1000 lives lost, and virtually every ship in the fleet took enough damage to at least force a port visit, if not a major repair/refit.
  - MarkMarine 4y ago
    Not positive how this got misconstrued, but I'm not saying an aircraft carrier is unsinkable. I'm saying it's designed not to pitch and roll as much as a say a destroyer or frigate. That's it.
    - TylerE 4y ago
      There were carriers in the Typhoon rolling 70 degrees. Virtually every aircraft in the fleet either tossed into the sea or damaged beyond even wartime economic repair
whycome 4y ago
I'm curious how such a wave could be....intentionally created.
- msisk6 4y ago
  That's actually a minor plot point in Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock."
- bee_rider 4y ago
  There were attempts to create tsunamis with nukes. But I’m not sure how effective this sort of thing would be against a carrier. A single wave could I guess be spotted from pretty far away, and is just a problem for a plane that wants to land or takeoff at that very moment. Creating general chop in excess of what the carrier can handle might be annoying, but it seems much more difficult (lots of energy involved in creating a bunch of waves, and I guess this rules out using a single huge explosion). Plus, I bet somebody would work out who did it if a country used a nuke to create a wave, there are only a couple candidates for who could do this sort of thing, after all. I bet it would have pretty significant diplomatic ramifications to… inconvenience a carrier group for a couple minutes.
  - Majromax 4y ago
    > There were attempts to create tsunamis with nukes. But I’m not sure how effective this sort of thing would be against a carrier. Not very effective. Tsunami waves move huge volumes of water, but in the open ocean they are also very long waves. Their travel speed is about the same as the "linear long wave speed", or about sqrt(g*D) where D is the depth of the water. As these waves approach the shore, however, the ocean becomes more shallow. Waves slow down. The tsunami effectively "piles up" on itself, and a wave that was a little high and a lot long becomes a wave that's a lot high and a little long. A carrier operating away from shore would see the tsunami in its more benign state. Coastal cities, however, would be in trouble.
  - worik 4y ago
    There was an experimental, and secret, programme in WWII to attempt to generate tsunami as weapons In New Zealand I know very little more than that, but it was in the news here some years ago. I do know it was a failure, quite a comprehensive failure

vkou 4y ago

Submarines won't do the coastal bombardment and air strikes and escort and reconnaissance work that regular navies are capable of.

scrumper 4y ago
Well they do some of that: reconnaissance both electronic and visual, coastal bombardment (and air strikes) with cruise missiles, and they can land very small groups of special forces too. Not to the extent surface ships can but if suddenly something made surface warfare impossible, submarines could take over a chunk of it. And you can imagine easily how drones might be embarked on a submarine and launched like cruise missiles.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago
  > coastal bombardment (and air strikes) with cruise missiles Submarine-launched missiles, in a diverse navy, can launch from underwater. That's great for stealth. It's terrible for budget. A submarine-only fleet would need to surface to economically attempt coastal bombardment and air defence. That said, I'm not sure what fraction of e.g. the U.S. Navy's submarine missiles are capable of subsurface dispatchment.

MarkMarine 4y ago

Aircraft carriers are gigantic and are designed to be stable. I’ve never been on the largest ones, but as a Marine I was on the Essex (a smaller carrier for jump jets and helicopters) and we sailed basically directly through a typhoon. The ship was pretty stable, pitching about 10 degrees from side to side. Enough to make some experienced sailors toss their lunch, and even if there was no wind, I think it would have been very treacherous to do flight ops with the deck pitching like that. For fixed wing jets that need to land on deck… even if you ignored the wind that goes along with these conditions, I think recovering aircraft would be too great a risk. That does bring up the wind and visibility that (almost always) goes along with these extreme sea states, which would be probably just as hazardous as the deck pitching about to flight ops. For basically everything else, I think the naval systems work just fine in bad weather. In regards to rogue waves, an 85 foot wave would put green water on the flight deck of the carrier I was on, something that would be difficult to imagine for me. Aircraft on the flight deck are chained down with multiple chains, each of the chains having the strength to hold the entire aircraft down, so I can’t imagine losing aircraft, but flooding the planes with sea water probably wouldn’t be good for them.

worik 4y ago
> Aircraft carriers are gigantic and are designed to be stable The ocean is bigger. It is only a matter of time until one is lost The ocean is the boss of sailors, a loving but harsh mistress.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  There have been plenty of aircraft carriers sunk, not sure what your point is.
TylerE 4y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoon_Cobra 3 destroyers sank, with almost 1000 lives lost, and virtually every ship in the fleet took enough damage to at least force a port visit, if not a major repair/refit.
- MarkMarine 4y ago
  Not positive how this got misconstrued, but I'm not saying an aircraft carrier is unsinkable. I'm saying it's designed not to pitch and roll as much as a say a destroyer or frigate. That's it.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    There were carriers in the Typhoon rolling 70 degrees. Virtually every aircraft in the fleet either tossed into the sea or damaged beyond even wartime economic repair

whycome 4y ago

I'm curious how such a wave could be....intentionally created.

msisk6 4y ago
That's actually a minor plot point in Neal Stephenson's latest novel "Termination Shock."
bee_rider 4y ago
There were attempts to create tsunamis with nukes. But I’m not sure how effective this sort of thing would be against a carrier. A single wave could I guess be spotted from pretty far away, and is just a problem for a plane that wants to land or takeoff at that very moment. Creating general chop in excess of what the carrier can handle might be annoying, but it seems much more difficult (lots of energy involved in creating a bunch of waves, and I guess this rules out using a single huge explosion). Plus, I bet somebody would work out who did it if a country used a nuke to create a wave, there are only a couple candidates for who could do this sort of thing, after all. I bet it would have pretty significant diplomatic ramifications to… inconvenience a carrier group for a couple minutes.
- Majromax 4y ago
  > There were attempts to create tsunamis with nukes. But I’m not sure how effective this sort of thing would be against a carrier. Not very effective. Tsunami waves move huge volumes of water, but in the open ocean they are also very long waves. Their travel speed is about the same as the "linear long wave speed", or about sqrt(g*D) where D is the depth of the water. As these waves approach the shore, however, the ocean becomes more shallow. Waves slow down. The tsunami effectively "piles up" on itself, and a wave that was a little high and a lot long becomes a wave that's a lot high and a little long. A carrier operating away from shore would see the tsunami in its more benign state. Coastal cities, however, would be in trouble.
- worik 4y ago
  There was an experimental, and secret, programme in WWII to attempt to generate tsunami as weapons In New Zealand I know very little more than that, but it was in the news here some years ago. I do know it was a failure, quite a comprehensive failure