So the time is the near future, the USS Gerald R. Ford is at sea in the Pacific when it and its surrounding battle group is ordered to check out something rather odd which has been picked up on satellite. They do so and report back that they’ve found a large drifting ship, its ummm…the Gerald R. Ford.
The other carrier is by itself with no other ships, it has sustained what seems to be light battle damage and has been completely abandoned, the log books are missing and the memory on all the electronic devices has been wiped, no planes of the air wing are present and it appears to have been abandoned in some hurry.
How does the world and the US military react? I don’t think it would be a case of 'Wow, hey, free carrier!" and I suspected people would be rather reluctant to serve on both the new and original Gerald R. Ford.
(this thread is inspired by a dream I had of exactly this scenario when falling asleep last night, it struck me so much that I got up and wrote it down)
After seeing it crewed and escorted back to harbor for a full inspection stem to stern, I think the reaction would, in fact, be “Hey, free carrier!” Those things ain’t cheap. They’d probably rename it, though.
How superstitious are modern sailors? It might strike a few people as mighty creepy. If you serve aboard, do you, too, risk disappearing, the way the “other” crew did?
But, otherwise, heck yeah! Free carrier! Put it to work mas pronto!
I’ve never watched Star Trek apart from some of the early movies so no, this thread wasn’t inspired by what I’m assuming is an episode with a similar premise in that series.
I have seen a lot of stories based on somewhat similar setups. None that focused primarily on a realistic guess as to what American and world leaders would do in reaction, though many had that as at least a side element.
As a matter of fact, I am struggling to write a tale of my own, which is in no way like yours, though it does involve similar surprising events, and deal with a realistic reaction thereto.
The main thing I would guess first for your scenario, is that everyone would demand to know where the thing came from, and assume at the start, that it is a hoax of some kind. After all, there is no current belief in time travel, and though some theoretical physicists are beginning to talk about alternate universes (in order to explain some math that isn’t squaring up for them agreeably), there is NO ONE who would immediately accept such a thing as real. And since it would be assumed to be a hoax, it would certainly not be towed to a port, nor would anyone risk having it fully crewed, only to turn out to be a terrorist plot to murder thousands of sailors and make fools of the country who took the thing.
Assuming a story where the ship is accepted as real after investigation, the next LOGICAL thing for a government to do, would not be to worry about what happens to the “free ship,” it would be to worry that whatever phenomenon allowed said twin to exist, would cause very dangerous and unpleasant other problems elsewhere. And the rest of the story would depend on whether or not the mystery of HOW, were solved.
What do I do with it? Sell it to the highest bidder. Or really the first bidder to get me enough cash to live comfortably on a blow mountain island inhabited by many many hookers.
The sucker is nuclear-powered, so the fuel and reactor will give some clues as to “when” the carrier came from. But I think the “new” carrier would be docked, stripped and studied to Hell and gone before they would ever consider commissioning her.
What **igor frankensteen **said. Any “benefits” of such a freebie carrier are dwarfed by the immense potential for this to be a Trojan Horse, and the insane curiosity to determine how this happened. The U.S. Navy would probably never use the new freebie carrier in combat. In fact, the cost of the investigation would probably dwarf the economic value of a freebie carrier ($5-7 billion.) Few sailors would dare to sail on it. The whole thing would cost the U.S. government more, in inquiries, investigations, and whatnot, than any freebie benefit of a freebie carrier. The USA already has more than 10 carriers.
The Navy isn’t going to put to sea, fully crewed, any vessel without extremely thorough quality assurance (QA) records from the design phase all the way through construction to comissioning and in service. There probably are laws against it (for good reason – before we had good QA practices, we had a lot more accidents and malfunctions at sea, some of which could be catastrophic). I think they’d have to strip her for parts or maybe even just for scrap, since even those parts wouldn’t have individual QA records.
Source: I served on a submarine and now work for the Navy as a civilian in logistics and engineering design (for a new class of submarine).
If we were in a major war, and an extra carrier would make a big difference, then Congress would probably pass a law allowing us to use a free carrier. But in peacetime? I seriously doubt it.
Not only do I think that we aren’t really going to be putting it into service, I think we’d need to be pulling the old one out of service as well. Would you serve on a boat that apparently will have went through some sort of time portal with no survivors left on board? I certainly wouldn’t. So, regardless of the military’s feelings on it, they are going to have difficulties crewing the ship.
The best thing to do is to pull the two of them into dock, side by side, and run experiments on them until the old one disappears. Then you have your answer as to where the new one came from. Better doing it that way, than having it disappear at random when you are not expecting it, and has crews on board.
Of course, if in inspection, you find that it is simply an elaborate hoax, then you can go ahead and put the old one back into service, and even the new one, assuming that you are able to inspect well enough to avoid any traps or other such unpleasantness that the hoaxer may have put in.