Of course, if one considers weapon use, it can be done – and has.
I dunno. Just the imagine in my mind, I guess. You can talk about it being close to shore or even in harbor if you like. 
Photos of capsizing carriers:
Japanese carrier Amagi (in shallow water in port, not fully capsized.
HMS Ark Royalabout to capsize, while under tow to Gibralter.
USS Yorktown, already capsized after Midwaym and about to sink.
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But all these are due to wartime action, not collisions or weather.
But the cargo ships are made to be light ( tare weight divide cargo volume) , to maximize cargo its carrying…
The aircraft carrier is made to have enough volume and top deck area for aircraft, and otherwise be strong and rugged…
An LNG tanker sinks in deep water. At a certain depth the spherical tanks each undergo structural failure, releasing the contents, which expand rapidly and rise through the water as an enormous bubble, growing to quarter of a mile in diameter by the time it reaches the surface. As the carrier arrives at the scene, a huge dome of water briefly appears, followed by a complete loss of buoyancy as the carrier falls hundreds of feet into a seemingly bottomless void filled with methane. As the void fills, the carrier is propelled upwards at high speed like a toy filled with air, leaping clear of the surface before crashing down again.
Natural alternative: a tectonic or volcanic event disturbs a large deposit of methane hydrate on the ocean floor, instantly liberating a trillion standard cubic feet of methane gas which rises as a huge bubble…
(I’m not sure whether the gas would tend to form a single large bubble or a fizzing mass of many smaller bubbles or somewhere in between, but the loss of buoyancy would be catastrophic in any case).
Carriers do have a superstructure (the large tower you see on the flight deck) and there is a limit as to how far they can tilt before you past the point of no return. A weakness are the elevators and the doors leading to and from the hangar. They are not water tight as they are simply to large to be (helicopters are actually quite tall). Within the hangar area there are many water tight hatches for entry ways that people would use, but the ship will still take on water and if there any type of vehicle storage below the hangar – which their usually is – it also won’t be sealed by a water tight doors as once again simply too large for said vehicles. So, potentially, if the ship was steered incorrectly and/or a freak wave were to blow the door in, the ship would take on a lot of water, flood any lower vehicle storage areas, and possibly be compromised.
Vehicle storage areas are very large. A semi could drive into the Iwo and up to the hangar to drop a trailer off. To give an example of how large the area is.
ATTENTION ALL HANDS: Cute girl on deck!
I’d like to see them pull those turns with a working galley.
I don’t think they allow girls on Navy ships during operations. Might you be misjudging the age of one of the women on board?
What I find amusing is that, even though the ship’s top speed is classified, they still allow a movie showing the wake while it’s moving at top speed to be publicly-viewable.
Nah, they don’t wax them, but they wash them. Waxing is a Blue Angels thing though. In operational NAVAIR, salt kills, corrosion rules. Constant battle at sea. Old Nimitz flight deck rat here, many cruises over 6 years.
Hello all, newbie here. Cheers, dig your board.
No guard rail around the deck, it appears. It’d sure be embarrassing to fall off the deck right when the brass were making their high speed turn evaluations.
So you can’t capsize an aircraft carrier…
But what about islands?
Sincerely,
Hank Johnson
In calm wind conditions, during the Iran-Hostage period, moving from the Med to the Indian Ocean, Nimitz outran all the escorts, circa 01-1980. Winds across the flight deck, translated from knots, 50-plus MPH, sometimes hiting 60-ish. You couldn’t go out on the roof, too windy. Steady as a rock, but quite a rumble. They are magnificent ships, but their purpose is ugly. It’s not really classified, anyone could figure it out. Four 26’ (if memory serves) screws, 280,000 shaft horsepower two big nuclear cookers, clean hull, do the math! Ha! Good take, Chronos. As for the women? I understand they keep them out of harm’s way in things NAVAIR.
I would and am able, to dance on a flight deck once again. It’s a trip nothing matches, not racing motorcycles, not firefighting, not sky diving nothing fulfills the buzz once you’ve danced on a flight deck for a few years. My kid raised up, fully mission capable, I’d go again in two seconds.
It’s a good comparison to highlight at least three significant differences v a large a/c carrier:
- the carrier has much more freeboard (ie the height from waterline to weather deck)
- the carrier has fewer in the way of big openings in the weather deck; it’s possible a wave could smash in a deck elevator, but again it’s much further above the waterline and covers much less of of the deck area than a bulker’s hatch covers.
- the carrier has a much larger margin of main hull girder structural strength, both in design and in practice, an issue with big bulker safety, which hasn’t been limited to just that incident, being deterioration in structural members exposed in the holds, both to corrosion and to damage by unloading gear.
An alternative mechanism of loss due to weather of big ships is the recent loss of the vehicle carrier El Faro
The ship lost power on its single screw power plant (in common with the vast majority of big merchant ships, but unlike a carrier’s quadruple screw plant) in a hurricane, probably just turned broadside to the waves and they were big enough to eventually capsize the ship.
But besides power plant redundancy (and El Faro a large ship but a carrier considerably bigger) and also greater stability margin for a carrier, a carrier is less likely to be exposed to very extreme weather to begin with. The decision of El Faro’s captain to sail is widely criticized, but even conservatively run big merchant ships don’t avoid bad weather as much as warships do especially in peacetime. There’s a direct economic motive in tension with principles of seamanship, though the latter is supposed to prevail and as a rule it does wrt really dangerous weather, but still the motive to take the ship through bad weather is greater for merchant than naval ships. And as referred to on the thread, a carrier would risk damage to its extremely expensive a/c on deck (the whole normal air wing of a US carrier doesn’t fit on the hangar deck) long before the ship itself was in danger.
Women have been on Navy ship since the mid-90’s and a lot of them are in NAVAIR. The first ones to receive them were the carriers due to the multiple berthings and they slowly retrofitted the smaller ships to have multiple berthings for men/women. And as of late, submarines as well.
Per that video, top speed doesn’t mean they were going 50-60 or whatever has been rumored. I’d say they weren’t as there were people on the flight deck and you can’t have people on the flight deck after a certain windspeed - I forgot the actual number but it’s no where near 50, it’s like 30-something knots, 34 perhaps? Also, if you notice no one has a preserver on so they most certainly were not going at full-speed since after a certain wind speed across the deck you have to have one on. I’d say thy were 14-17 knots looking at the video. I’ll listen again and see if they mention speed anywhere. Also, potentially, the video is cut out of sequence. May have tested rudders, speed, and then rudders at speed.
There is a guard rail it’s just been dropped down and then acts as a safety net, usually it’s not up unless there are a lot of non-military civilians around like during a fleetweek.
Galley would have been up and running. We did the same maneuvers and nothing was shut down/stopped. Albeit we never were able to get the ship past 12 degrees. Sometimes, they’ll do it totally randomly to test to see how “secure for sea” everyone is.
Oh, I’m aware that they have women on ships. I was just disputing that there would be any girls.
And if they were sailing downwind, it’s possible that the windspeed on deck was significantly lower than the speed of the ship.
Full video: http://youtu.be/zNZczIgVXjg
Now you know what Admirals get paid for–how to talk to nimrods.
They don’t teach that in Annapolis.
We did attempt to sink a fleet with an atom bomb at one time. Some results here.
I thought the primary danger to large ships is not the waves washing over the top deck, but the troughs not giving adequate support to the keel. So that the ship “bridges” two waves and suffers structural damage due to its own weight. It doesn’t matter how water-tight you are if your keel can’t support the weight of the ship.
IIRC, that’s what happened to the Edmund Fitzgerald.
I’m liking the freak wave theory, someone posted a link above which lead to it. I find it particularly amusing as freak waves were never considered to be real until the 90’s and not studied until like 2005. Yet, anyone who has spent time on the high seas will have seen them. They have even detected them with anything that deals with waves, including optics. So cool.
There was a cruise ship that was slammed by one on the side, windows gave, and that side was flooded.
Supposedly, as one had mentioned above, if the keel is not supported then the ship can foul. I’m sure this was part of the design criteria of the ships and probably designed the ships bow accordingly to pierce through to reduce that.
If you guys are in NYC or any other place that has a Fleet Week, you should take a tour of the ships. The construction is different. It’s not like a cruise ship with flat floors. Imagine a cruise ship that has the internal structure akin to a steel bridge.