inverted flight

It would be almost as boring as pub rants from our favorite English barfly.

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George. Whats the approximate top speed of the fastest US Aircraft Carrier? Ive heard that one could water ski behind a carrier, roped to a bow wave.
My previously mentioned friend said that it had been done somewhere , but I understand that most carrier jockies are notorious liars.

40 knots, is that right george ?

WOW, thats a bit faster than my tub can go. I could get 40 out of it for a short burst , but Id strain the little dears engines. Ill bet I could take an Aircraft carrier in a drag race though.

Suppose you took an inverted flight of fancy down the foggy ruins of the unimaginable vistas of evolutionary time and found yourself looking forward from the starting point rather than backwards from here where something of what happened can be seen.

If a boulder was filmed rolling from the top of a mountain to the valley below would it be science to describe the route it took? Could that route have been predicted from the point where it began its journey?

In the former case the description would be mere reportage. An elementary process. One might trick up that process with a tapestry of teleology but it would still be reportage no matter how many scientific sinecures were involved in the teleologies. Anybody can do the "what" and the "when" and the "where". What about the "how" and the "whence"?

Christian theology attempts to guide the rolling boulder of human existence from above rather than adopting a wait-and-see policy. It is thus superior. A higher level in the application of human intelligence.

PS. I notice that the three adverts we have attracted to this thread, the name of the game, are about evolution and education.

Has astronomy any other option other than assuming that the earth is the centre of the universe and any conclusions it draws can only be derived from that perspective?

Have you been inhaling ashtrays again?

Suppose I have. What difference would it make?

You should beware of inhaling wood dust and wood treatment products. I'll have ashtrays anytime before those.

Well your'e right on most counts. However the top speed is about 40 mph, or 35 Kts. The last two or so Kts depend on sea conditions and the ship's loading - the airwing is worth about 3,000 tons; the ammo load another 6,000 tons, etc.

A close and longtime friend was in command of Enterprise at the same time I had Carl Vinson. Once, unexpectedly we encountered each other off the Coronados islands on the Pacific coast of Mexico. We both had our airwings aboard, but were on independent exercises, with no escorts and no one to watch. It was a perfectly calm day with a glassy sea and enough refraction so that you could actually see over the distant horizon. The old rivalry took hold and we soon found ourselves about 1000yds apart racing at full speed. It went on for about an hour, and I made the engineer give me every RPM up to the red line (the reactors were loafing along at 68% power). The flight decks filled with cheering sailors. The max speed I saw was a hair under 35 Kts. There are two versions of who won: mine is true.

That's fast enough to waterski, but you'd need a long towrope - the turbulent wake behind the ship at those speeds is very violent - one can see trailing white water for a couple of miles.

The power required to move an aircraft or a sub through the air or water varies as the cube of the speed - thus doubling the speed requires eight times the power. For a surface vessel, travelling in two fluid media it's a bit worse because of the energy dissipated in the bow wave between the media.

One's perception of the speed of a moving object is related to its size. A 747 on takeoff doesn't seem to be moving as fast as a smaller aircraft. Same goes for bigh ships. The nuclear plant delivers power increases very fast and a carrier can accelerate from zero speed to 20 Kts in the length of the ship.

I should add that a nuclear carrier can run at maximum speed indefinately - the reactors operate at constant temperature and are at their most efficient at maximum power. They are fuelled for the 50 year life of the ship with a significant reserve, so that isn't a consideration either. I once sailed back to Norfolk from the Persian Gulf , going around South Africa & up the South Atlantic - at 28 Kts all the way (we had been deployed for 11 months and were in a hurry).

Im totally envious. ALthough I must say I never heard of the Karl Vinson.

My little boat will only cruise at 20Kts at a fairly calm sea. Up the wave sizes to anything around 10 ft and were doing 5Kts anything bigger and were looking for cover. (Old v bold, knowhatImean?)

Ive just seen that theyve adopted the gyro stabilizer gizmos that you used on Carriers , and now made em available for much smaller.. Id love one of those babies but the gyro stabilzers and weight packages costs about 65K for a boat like mine.

Carl Vinson (CVN-70) is the third ship, in the Nimitz class (Nimitz, Dwight Eisenhower, Carl Vinson, Teddy Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, John Stennis, Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.) The first three ships had 17 year fuel loadings in their reactors (later extended to 20 years): while the remaining ships have 50 years of fuel - as well as other structural, systems, and eloctrinic enhancements. These upgrades have been added to the first three during overhauls. Enterprise was the first nuclear carrier and has a much earlier design with eight small reactors insterad of two large ones. It is slightly longer and narrower at the beam than the Nimitz class.

Originally carriers were named for Revolutionary War battles & warships ... Lexington, Saratoga, Yorktown, Wasp, Hornet, Enterprise, Essex, etc. FDR broke the tradition with the naming of an Exxex class carrier "Shangri La" after the fictional place in James Hilton's novel - this following his ironic statement that the Doolittle bombing raid on Tokyo was launched from there (actually it was USS Hornet). Soon after WWII the pattern of naming them after politicians was started with the third ship in the Midway class -- Franklin D. Roosevelt. The navy tried to get back to tradition with the new Saratoga & Lexington in 1960, but politics eventually prevailed again. Carl Vinson was a Senator & Chairman of the Armed Services committee who generally voted for Navy appropriations. Venality and back scratching have trumped tradition ever since.

Spendius - if that was the only problem tormenting you and causing you to babble interminably on the web, you're in luck. I got the solution: you can test it by asking ladies of your acquaintance whether they would like you to enter a bid for “The Vivid Pink”. Christie's is offering it at auction:

I never did do artistic impressions HS.

Those computer generated ones of the Big Bang make me laugh.

I might be up for making sheep's eyes at a lady wearing it in the cleft of her cleavage mind you.

That was elementary arithmetic, not artistic impression. Perhaps you should return to the pub and sleep it off?!

http://www.nationaljewelernetwork.com/njn/content_display/fashion/jewelry-auctions/e3id386c4a26251b0b5b6fd246085a86e9c

George, Thank you for that information. It clears up the name sequence for carriers. I always thought that things associated with the Revolution were somehow the standard and that the later admirals and presidents were the new standard (Except for Carl Vinson). I now know the naming in mind. I hope we dont have a Bill CLinton or a GW Bush.Wasnt Enterprise named for Capt Kirks ship?

Enterprise was originally the name of an early revolutionary wat ship. The Nuclear carrier Enterprise was launched in 1959 - and it's still in service today - after extensive modernization. In fact many of the character and organizational elements of the Star Trek TV show (& subsequent films) were taken from Navy ships.

The Navy reluctantly named a nuclear Sub after Jimmy Carter - as a required payback to get one named after Hyman Rickover. I doubt seriously that we will ever see a ship named after LBJ, Clinton, GW Bush .... or Obama either.

However, I am bercoming increasingly comvinced that history will be much kinder to GW Bush than the current occupant of the White House.

Of course you would. However, Im hoping that the next generations can reverse the trend in creeping illiteracy.

Why wait for future generations - no time like the present:


In case you track the text on the Perseus database, you'll find it's by Aristotle - and that I corrected a typo in their Greek version (the next to last word in their text erroneously ends in sigma instead of the correct alpha). And that furthermore my political views are indistinguishable from those you were boorishly attempting to criticize - on grounds of illiteracy, no less! Have a happy Thanksgiving.