Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ames!hc!pprg.unm.edu!unmvax!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!osu-cis!att!cbnews!military
From: military@cbnews.ATT.COM (William B. Thacker)
Newsgroups: sci.military
Subject: Re: Aircraft carrier discussion
Message-ID: <3447@cbnews.ATT.COM>
Date: 25 Jan 89 03:52:10 GMT
Organization: AT&T Bell Laboratories
Lines: 22
Approved: military@att.att.com

>Do you realize how many missiles hits it takes to "sink" a Nimitz
>class aircraft carriers (since that is what is being built right now).
>I read in a magazine about three years ago that it would take 10 or
>more lucky hits to make it useless...

That is the official US Navy opinion.  You can find people who will
raise serious doubts about that.  (A single Exocet hit wasn't supposed
to gut the Sheffield either.)  The matter has not been tested on modern
supercarriers.  Historically, one or two kamikaze hits often sufficed
to disable the flight deck -- without which the carrier is useless --
until major repairs could be done, although those carriers were not
precisely comparable with modern ones.

>It was the Exocet that sunk the Sheffield, it was the fact of one, the
>Sheffield was made of a metal compound that caught on fire...

Sorry, not true.  Many people have criticized aluminum superstructures,
which are known to be a fire hazard, in the wake of the Sheffield's loss...
but the Sheffield was steel.

                                     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
                                 uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu