Submarine Aircraft Carriers?
Mil-blogger Murdoc Online posted earlier this week about a thread on a discussion board that started talking about submersible aircraft carriers. Someone found an official-looking drawing of a proposed design for one, and this set off quite a discussion of the feasibility of such a beast. The discussion kind of petered out, though, after a commenter noted that the drawing in question came from the October 1963 Proceedings.
We submariners have got to get involved in these discussions earlier...
posted by Bubblehead at 7:28 PM
4 Comments:
You know what would be interesting, instead of launching & recovering manned craft is to make the pictured submarine a platform for unmanned recon drones like the Predator. Launch 'em under local control, hand them off to satellite control for their mission, then pick 'em up again under local control for recovery when the job's done. BZ!!
12/18/2005 4:19 PM
Dude.
The Japanese were way ahead of us, and we took ones back to Hawaii as post-WWII prizes to see what we could learn (not much, apparently; they were sunk, and one was found again recently to much excitement in some quarters).
Here's a link to one of the stories of talking the I-400 across. Another version is in Paul Schratz' book Submarine Commander.
I think I woulda liked to have met Schratz. He made the retired admirals nervous...
12/24/2005 1:50 AM
Dream on. Airedales would never take to hotracking, anyway. :)
1/17/2006 2:15 AM
This is actually pretty easy to answer, considering past history of US surface ships. Doors large enough to allow aircraft in and out of a submersible would be hellish to maintain. The old Virginia class cruisers (CGN38 - CGN41) all originally had helo elevators in the fantail. After a number of years of failures with the doors leaking and the elevators breaking, they eventually just welded them all shut (CGN41 had the doors welded shut while she was still in construction!) The hangar bay then became storage spaces and other things (a make-shift brig was one thing that was down in there, as well as the RT training room.)
1/12/2010 9:45 AM
Post a Comment
<< Home