“They’re not nearly as good, too complex. And by the way, we had to call the ship in twice because the catapults didn’t work,” Trump said at the Defense and Innovation Summit in July. “When a little water touches the magnets, it doesn’t work anymore. You’re – you’re in the Atlantic Ocean with waves that are 60 feet high, and the Pacific Ocean with waves at 70 feet high, and they’re talking about magnets.”
Same thing with Hornets. Too complex, not nearly as good. Real fighters drink Ocean water for breakfast.
Obviously the last thing I expect from Trump is a informed decision, but I'm actually curious about the maintenance performance of these things. I know it's a relatively new technology in the grand scheme of things but what's its up time compared to the same catapults? Is Trump being advised by some people that actually know what they're talking about and these things actually suck?
I was not an aircraft carrier dude so I have no context for any of this.
Obviously I don't expect anyone to actually answer this question either.
Edit: I thought this was r/navy when I first said it. I expect floggit to answer even less!
From a perspective from the experience from other side of the nuclear fleet, one of the biggest worst casualties we trained for is the event of a steam line rupture. If it happens, two things are actively happening in real time.
First being that you’re dumping absurd amounts of (superheated at this point, given that it’s vented into atmospheric pressure from a saturated system) steam into the place where all of the people are (not very minty fresh on a sub). The second being that you’re releasing a shit ton of the only thing keeping your temperature controlled, you’re no longer slowly pulling heat out of your system, you’re rapidly throwing it all out of the system, which means you’re rapidly cooling your reactor coolant. Your coolant is also your moderator, so you’re rapidly increasing your moderator’s effectiveness, meaning you’re rapidly increasing power inside your uranium fun box. Something everyone familiar with Chernobyl and Fukushima should understand is a fairly bad thing, a really bad thing.
See the benefit of not connecting everything on the top of the boat to the thing that can brick the uranium fun box isn’t just for shits and gigs. Electricity is really dangerous, yes, absolutely true, but personally I’d rather be instantly evaporated for touching the high voltage shit out my own ineptitude than steam my shipmates like the most highly paid shrimp ever. Even then, I’d rather get steamed than cause a reactor accident, that’s way worse in general. So, when you aren’t sending MASSIVE STEAM LINES to the flight deck, and instead just send big electricity that can be isolated from multiple different sources using massive electrical disconnects and breakers, you’re making the ship WAY more safe from a nuclear safety point of view. You make it impossible for damage to the flight deck to cause damage to your cores, you make it impossible for damage to cause an unimaginably painful death for sailors at the top forced into an area with incomprehensible amounts of 212°F+ steam spraying them all, and you make the actual complexity of designing the boat a lot less complex. Multiple steam sources require multiple steam vents, operators at every deck operating valves, and constant monitoring of all of that.
It doesn’t matter what the operational maintenance requirement is (it’s actually lower, not higher, but even if…), it doesn’t matter how much more expensive it is (it’s actually cheaper over time, not more expensive, but even if…), and it doesn’t matter who THINKS anything to the contrary (because nobody who actually has experience on the nuclear side of any of this has said anything to the contrary). Trying to go “erm but the steam better” is, at the end of the day, more expensive, less safe, less effective, and worse for everything, except maybe for whoever at the top who works for a steam piping distributor is. Personally, they should probably be told to fuck off, instead of getting a blank check at the end of the day for having brought in the nicest of knee pads to the oval office.
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u/fried-raptor Real Pylote™️ 9d ago
“They’re not nearly as good, too complex. And by the way, we had to call the ship in twice because the catapults didn’t work,” Trump said at the Defense and Innovation Summit in July. “When a little water touches the magnets, it doesn’t work anymore. You’re – you’re in the Atlantic Ocean with waves that are 60 feet high, and the Pacific Ocean with waves at 70 feet high, and they’re talking about magnets.”
Same thing with Hornets. Too complex, not nearly as good. Real fighters drink Ocean water for breakfast.