Aircraft Carriers Are Sitting Ducks

[sir pball]

58. Depends on what you mean by "take out"...

Sink a supercarrier? Even the Russians at the height of the Cold War never planned on that. A 100,00+ ton ship with extensive damage control is, not to overuse a phrase, unsinkable.

But…in military parlance, "mission kill" a carrier? Absolutely, and pretty easily at that.

See, you don't actually need to sink a warship to neutralize it. You just need to hit it in a way that neutralizes its warfighing ability…and with a supercarrier there are so many ways.

A torpedo that bends all four prop shafts. A missile that hits a hangar deck and bows up the flight deck. A missile that hits the island and takes out the bridge and flight control tower. A torpedo that detonates under-keel amidships and doesn't cause flooding but a reactor SCRAM.

There's a lot of ways to take out a warship without sinking it, for reference see the USS South Dakota at the Second Naval Battle of Guadalcanal suffering massive electrical failures despite no armor-piercing hits…and then see the USS Washington responding