Altrenate Carrier for the 80's RN

[acelanceloet]

I did some quick calculations......
I estimated the weight of one of the sub-based reactors here as 1500 tons. the total weight for the nuclear plant would end up being 6000 tons then.
these ships had an displacement of 22500 tons. this means about 1/4th of your total weight will be reactor. put some fuel on board (let's say, the 4000 tons of the centaur, although modern aircraft are a bit more thirsty), some diesel generators, some steam turbines...... and you have only half your ship left for casco weight, crew spacing, aircraft, weapons and water.
your hull weight will be more then 7710 tons (it would be 7710 tons if it was an destroyer build up to this size, I have no formula ready to calculate this for carriers but I estimate it on 8000 tons) and now you have.....

22500-6000-8000-4000= 4500 tons

getting a bit cramped, don't you think? don't forget this exludes the weight of superstructure and flight deck (about 1000 tons), deck equipment(about 50 tons), aircraft(about 900 tons), landing craft (90 tons each), crew (90-100 tons at least)

so yeah, long story short, this is why you want only 2 reactors on board. and if you need another reason..... where are you going to place them when you need to refuel them every... say.... 10 years? submarine reactors have less range the comparable surface reactors, because they have to be compact. this is the same problem the CDG has. if you have to cut open your deck every 10 years, would you want to do so on 2 places or 4?

also, if you go for nuclear, I would propose an all new design. your cruising speed, weight distribution, tank arrangement, superstructure and scantling is going to change entirely. that is enough to be cheaper to design an all new hull with the centaur in mind, then taking the centaur and taking it as starting point, as you have done now.

[shippy2013]

Re fueling....I was in visioning shaft leading up the two or three decks to the hangar then the normal lift could be used to lead to the deck and vies versa to bring in....

As for the design I'm still tweaking and altering things, I don't want to go to big I'm basing this on the RN of the 1980's don't forget.....

[acelanceloet]

Re fueling....I was in visioning shaft leading up the two or three decks to the hangar then the normal lift could be used to lead to the deck and vies versa to bring in....

As for the design I'm still tweaking and altering things, I don't want to go to big I'm basing this on the RN of the 1980's don't forget.....

you cannot bring nuclear fuel through the hangar deck. you have to be able to reach directly in to the reactor (don't ask me how exactly it works, I am trying to find this out myself, but as much as described above I know for certain)

also, you are designing the RN's first nuclear surface ship. whatever you say, you are going big already.
seeing that the CVF were an all new design, I can't see why this would not be.

[shippy2013]

Maybe a new design of deck lift, positioned over the reactor compartment, shaft leading down beyond to the reactors. My plan is the lift can not only rise up and down between the hangar and flight deck but also opens like a set of large doors leading down to the reactors, depends how much area four reactors would take up, lift would have to have the same length and width dimensions of the reactor compartment, might not be a bad thing as this may mean it is capable of bring more than one aircraft up at a time too.....
As you say I'm trying to design theRN first nuclear surface ship so some innovation is required and the RN has proved good at this in the past...
Plus I've never ruled out screwing up this design and trying something new....

[acelanceloet]

you can just remove the lift in that case, but then you have to design your deck arrangement so that you have 4 lifts over your 4 reactor compartiments (you want to have them split over at least 2 separate compartiments, and even then you are going to need to oversize your lifts as the reactors are not directly next to each other)

[shippy2013]

Over size lifts might not be bad thing. Two separate reactor compartments on the ships centre line, two centre line lifts!....

[acelanceloet]

I mean REALLY oversized lifts, like 15*30 meters or more. the 15 would stay about the same, as the length of the aircraft is about that, but think of an elevator that can have 3 or 4 F-35 on it.... yep, oversized

[erik_t]

Nuclear plant cost scales rather linearly with the number of reactors. Indeed, several post-Enterprise CVAN designs withered on the vine because they still required more than two reactors. Only with the massive A4W of the Nimitz was the nuclear carrier made anywhere close to affordable.

A four-core CVLN is probably a non-starter.

[shippy2013]

Are we not forgetting the French Charles de Gaulle, she is nuclear powered and approx within my sizing limits 261m only 27m longer than my design, so a small nuclear carrier is possible....... And affordable......

I could return to a two reactor design, The Rolls Royce PWR1 could I suppose be built with a larger output....... Increasing the PWR1 power by just a mere 20% doesn't sound to ambitious and I believe this would still provide adequate power with two. A redesigned hull to compensate too.

Not to mention the RN was receiving the PWR2 in 1985 so we could assume these reactors went into the ship, the PWR2 had the Core H designed to last 25-30 years.

[acelanceloet]

the CDG is absolutely the worst example of an carrier that works. she is too small to operate USN aircraft, a bit slower then originally required, has a relatively short time between refuelings, and is french I would certainly not call her affordable as well. I have once read an post somewhere about the story of her life and design, but with all the stupid things they did for constructing her I was actually impressed they had not stopped and scrapped her halfway instead of operating her.

ow and, that ship is over twice the displacement of the ship you are building, and an all new hull design especially build for what they wanted. you are going to get even worse problems if your starting point is faulty already.