“And I want this city to fight and FLOAT!”
I would like your engineers to design me a brand new 1,100 foot by 134 foot multi-level city that will efficiently house about 6,000 people, required supplies, services, entertainment, workspaces, and trauma level hospital care to support them.
Include a military airport and support armament for 90 specialized aircraft. Provide redundant state of the art communication and electronics distribution systems with the power generated by 2 nuclear reactors. This city should also have commercial fueling and maintenance stations and high tech fire departments. Design it to last for at least 50 years without major remodeling. Your budget is in the neighborhood of $11.7 billion.
Oh, and I want it to float!
We haven’t settled on a name for this new city yet, but it will be classified as a United States Navy CVN-21 Aircraft Carrier!
France, India, Great Britain, Italy and Spain all have aircraft carriers displacing anywhere from 17,000 to 43,000 tons. The CVN-21 Gerald R. Ford Class, in contrast, will fall in the 100,000 ton range. Hence the unofficial designation: “super-carrier”. Just one of these ships packs a more potent air force than many countries.
The US Department of Defense awarded Northrop Grumman Newport News in Virginia the design contract in July 2003, with the first carrier of its series scheduled to be operational in 2020. As the successor to the Nimitz Class super-carriers, the CVN-21 program will increase daily aircraft sortie capacity to 160 with a crisis surge of 220, increase survivability to better handle future threats, require fewer sailors, and have depot maintenance requirements that could support an increase of up to 25% in operational availability.
Engineering of this giant ship by Northrop includes using a diverse suite of integrated computer-aided design tools including a CATIA software suite for simulation of the production processes and a CAVE virtual environment package.
The combination of a new design nuclear propulsion plant and an improved electric plant are expected to provide 2-3 times the electrical generation capacity of previous carriers, enabling systems like Electromagnetic Aircraft Launching System, Advanced Arresting Gear, and integrated combat electronics. Other features include an enhanced flight deck, improved weapons handling, aircraft servicing efficiency, and a flexible outboard island arrangement allowing for future technology insertion.
The carrier will be well armed with the missiles from Raytheon and Ramsys GmbH. It will carry an estimated 90 aircraft including the F-35 joint strike fighter, F/A-18E/F Super Hornet, E-2D Advanced Hawkeye, EA-18G, MH-60R/S helicopters and unmanned combat air vehicles.
And did I mention that the CVN-21 is expected do this all day long at over 35 miles per hour?
We can do this!
By K.B. Elliott
K. B. Elliott is a freelance writer for Engineer-Jobs.com. Working many related positions in the Detroit area for over 30 years gives him a unique perspective on the process. To read more of his blogs, please go to Engineer-Jobsblog.com, and be sure to check out the postings for jobs in nearly any industry at Nexxt
Become a member to take advantage of more features, like commenting and voting.
Register or sign in today!