The aliens from Close Encounters and Cowboys and Aliens had no trouble moving very large ships around . They could hire them.
It depends on the coconut, of course. Preliminary research of the coconut/aircraft carrier problem has been done.
Ah, the good ole USS Batfish. They floated it up the river, parked it in the gulley, then closed and drained the gulley. Landlocked submarine.
How is the cooling accounted for? Is seawater part of the exchange? If so, the reactor is gonna be a mess.
The Mississippi River isn’t in the general vicinity of Kansas. You could, however, reach the Arkansas River, and from there sail it to the Mississippi.
If you wanted to do the carve up and relocated, I’d suggest barges.
As far as airships go, they may not have made them yet, but DARPA was proposing new modern airships that could haul 500 to 1000 tons.
http://www.defenseindustrydaily.com/walrus-heavylift-blimp-getting-off-the-ground-01103/
This is still being discussed commercially. So with those babies (1000 ton payload), we’d only need ~100 to airlift the carrier intact.
I don’t see any reason the ship would be destroyed merely by sitting on its bottom in the middle of a field. Leaning on the flight deck might not be too good for it, but sitting upright? I would expect it to be structurally sound to hold together whether in sea or on land. Now, how it got parked there is a different story. 
Will it meet the Typhoon class submarine at the front door with a martini?
Could it navigate the Great Lakes and the St. Lawrence to the ocean? They look closer than another deep water.
Previous SDMB thread:
Could an aircraft carrier reach Chicago? (2007)
And another related one:
How far “inland” can I get a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier? (2009)
Let’s see if we can make this project full of hot air.
It seems that hot air inside a hot air balloon provides 0.05kg/m3 of buoyancy. Let’s assume 80% of that is net and the rest is lost in fabric and rigging. Let’s strip the carrier of everything unnecessary but put transportation rigging instead, say 70 000 000 kg. We need 1 750 000 000 m3 of air.
For redundancy, the transport should have 16 balloons, so that with a puncture or loss of power it could land gracefully from its average hovering height of some feet. Additionally, the rigging should facilitate transfer of balloon support on the fly to avoid excessive trim in emergencies.
One balloon is thus 109 000 000 m3. The diameter is 600m and they are arranged in a 2x2x4 formation. The heat comes from the vessels reactor. This kind of wind area needs a heavy anchor, provided by a fleet of towing trucks, providing also the cooling water for the reactor. This kind of fleet tramples a large area, particularly considering the distance, so it would be convenient to have them harvest the corn at the same time.
If we can afford more buoyancy, so that the cooling water can be facilitated inside the vessel, I suggest we add skirts and make it a hovercraft (most of the buoyancy still coming from the thin air). Hovercrafts are fast vessels but have automatic brakes. I think we can rely on frequent western winds to provide the propulsion. It would be best to add wheels that hardly touch the ground when sailing. I wonder how much buoyancy we lose because the top of the balloons are now min 1.2km high?
That’s kind of exaggerating don’t you think? I saw a speed bump when I was there.
Check calculations from previous pages. Wouldn’t using hydrogen give much more lifting power than hot air? Plus, you don’t need the added weight and complications related to needing a heat source.
Yeah, I was inspired by them. Those were rigid body airships. Air is not a fuel and it’s free but it may not be best. At least hydrogen is flammable, so any failure would get maximum cool factor.
Apparently so. I served on the USS Ulysses S. Grant (SSBN-631) back in the late '80s.
Exactly.
The reactor cannot operate in dry dock. While you do need seawater for cooling water, this could be replaced by hooking up hoses in dry dock. However, the surrounding seawater also functions as a shield for the reactor, especially for neutrons. (Water is an excellent attenuator for a neutron flux.)
A burning aircraft carrier crashing to the ground? Mega coolness.
Get a wicked witch, raft her in the ocean, and wait for a tornado.
Walter Ego gets points for harvesting the corn.
So, apparently some version of this topic comes up every two years?
In Chicago, they took a more direct approach with the U-505, and rolled it right out of the lake. (http://www.nps.gov/history/history/online_books/butowsky1/u505p.htm)
Ah, yes - the Cotopaxi:
It seem to me that if you can get a fleet of Osprey to haul a dome designed to wall off an entire city, why couldn’t we do the same with the ship?
Would the Navy let the EPA do that to one of their ships, no matter how misplaced it was?
Chuck Norris
We need to launch two of them, along with an alien ship. Then we can weld them together in space and…er right, I’ll quit trying to recreate things.
With all of the figuring out how to make the ship float with hydrogen or a big balloon - why can’t we just fill up the ship - or at least parts of it - with the hydrogen, thus removing the need for at least some of the balloons, rigging, etc?
The ship is designed to be watertight, right? At least some of the compartments?