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Oh, for the lazy curious, here's a couple links:

http://www.navy.mil/navydata/cno/n87/usw/issue_34/one.html
http://navysite.de/ssn/ssn575.htm

and while looking at the wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_reactor), I noticed that the Soviets did try some liquid metal cooled (not sodium, but bismuth-lead) submarine reactors. Crazy Ivan indeed.

Hot sodium and water don't get along well, and there's plenty of water to be had around a submarine, in the event of a coolant leak, things go from bad to worse. Call me Captain Obvious.

Yorktown was the prototype Smart Ship, a test bed. But Yorktown's career did not begin or end in September of 1997. USS Yorktown (CG 48)

The Geek clings to these old anecdotes like Linus to his blanket. But they have worn thin.

If there were less people on board, the fires would have gone out of control. The Forrestal is the most important one to look at. Fire on the deck, fire teams sent in, munitions explode, killing most of the firefighters and damaging the hoses. Aviation fuel drips down into the interior of the ship through holes in the deck from the munitions cooking off. To stop the fires on the deck, human wave attacks were required.

Reducing the crew reduces casualties and it reduces redundant crew members, which in a war or accident are needed when there are casualties.

If the Forrestal had a smaller crew and all the firefighters are out of commission, what is going to put out the fire? A computer?

http://www.chinfo.navy.mil/navpalib/ships/carriers /histories/cv59-forrestal/forrestal-fire.html

http://navysite.de/cvn/cv59.htm#acc
"On July 29, 1967 the USS FORRESTAL was operating on Yankee Station off the coast of North Vietnam conducting combat operations. This was the fifth such day of operations and at 10:52am the crew was starting the second launch cycle of the day, when suddenly a Zuni rocket accidentally fired from an F-4 Phantom into a parked and armed A-4 Skyhawk. The accidental launch and subsequent impact caused the belly fuel tank and a 1,000 pound bomb on the Skyhawk to fall off, the tank broke open spilling JP5 (jet fuel) onto the flight deck and ignited a fire. Within a minute and a half the bomb was the first to cook-off and explode, this caused a massive chain reaction of explosions that engulfed half the airwings aircraft, and blew huge holes in the steel flight deck. Fed by fuel and bombs from other aircraft that were armed and ready for the coming strike, the fire spread quickly, many pilots and support personnel were trapped and burned alive.
Fuel and bombs spilled into the holes in the flight deck igniting fires on decks further into the bowels of the ship. Berthing spaces immediately below the flight deck became death traps for fifty men, while other crewmen were blown overboard by the explosion.
Nearby ships hastened to the FORRESTAL's aid. The ORISKANY (CV 34), herself a victim of a tragic fire in October 1966, stood by to offer fire-fighting and medical aid to the larger carrier. Nearby escort vessels sprayed water on the burning FORRESTAL and within an hour the fire on the flight deck was under control. The crew heroically fought the fire and carried armed bombs to the side of the ship to throw them overboard for 13 hours. Secondary fires below deck took another 12 hours to contain."

"Once the fires were under control, the extent of the devastation was apparent. Most tragic was the loss to the crew, 134 had lost their lives, while an additional 64 were injured, this was and still remains the single worst loss of life on a navy vessel since the USS FRANKLIN (CV 13) was bombed in WWII. The ship proceeded to Cubi Point in the Philippines for temporary repairs. In only eight days enough repairs were made that she could start the long trip back to her home port of Norfolk, Virginia for permanent repairs. On her way home she was capable of operating aircraft if needed.

FORRESTAL would spend seven months in the yards being repaired, she was re-built from the hanger up and forward to aircraft elevator number four, this accounts for about 1/5 the ships length and 5 decks. On April 8, 1968 FORRESTAL was once again ready to take her place in the fleet, she was never to return to Vietnam."

However, carriers still cary fuel for other ships in the carrier group.

Nope - there are auxilliary ships specifically designed for transporting fuel, and one is generally attached to a carrier group specifically for that purpose. I was stationed in one (USS Wabash, AOR-5).

That's not to say that a carrier couldn't supply fuel for another ship... there are procedures for transfering fuel underway that can be used between almost any combination of ships you care to mention. This isn't something that you'd see done normally, though. In my time in the Navy (4 years, 3 on a ship dedicated to underway replenishment), I only saw that done once, and that was part of an exercise - no fuel was actually transfered.

So unless the Navy's changed their supply management drastically in the last few years, carriers are far too busy, um, being carriers to deal with the (pretty much daily) need to refuel other ships.

Are we the only country with a leader who went swimming and never came back?

(Note that, since I have space to use up for the spam filter, there are several ironically named swimming pools named after former Prime Minister Harold Holt, as well as an American Frigate.

More likely, it'd be the USS Grasp, or its sister ship, the USS Grapple.

Absolute and total bollocks.

Take the number of modern-navy ships sunk by battle damage post-Vietnam. Now take the number damaged post-Vietnam. The latter is considerably greater than the former. I'll work backwards a bit here, but I might get a few transposed.

USS Cole: Kamikaze floating bomb. Sealifted home, repaired.

USS Princeton: Mine impact, with sympathetic detonation of a second nearby mine. Severe structural damage, fires, cracked superstructure, flooded magazine. Ship was capable of conducting air action within two hours, stayed on station as local AAW command vessel for an additional 30 hours until relieved.

USS Samuel B. Roberts: Mine impact. Sealifted home and repaired.

USS Stark: Two Exocet strikes, with one missile detonation. Sailed home under her own power, and repaired.

Damage control is the difference between the Stark, which took two Exocets and sailed home, and the HMS Sheffield, which took a single dud Exocet, burned from stem to stern, and sunk under tow. It is taken *exteremely* seriously by the US Navy, and while we don't plate ships with inches of steel armor any more, rest assured that a lot of money is spent on redundant systems, DC training, shock-hardening, and "armor of form" to allow ships to continue fighting after they get hit, and to make it home for repairs. Even if we're not talking about combat, there are all sorts of Bad Things that can happen to ships. Take a look at the Belknap(collided with the Kennedy, fuel spill, fire, basically burned down to the waterline), the Forrestal, or the Enterprise for examples.

It's accidents like those that drove home how unbelieveably important damage control is. Yes, if a Mach 2+ SS-N-19 delivers its 750 kilogram warhead successfully, the ship's a definite mission-kill at the least. But there are a whole host of less-destructive situations that can result in disaster with bad DC, so DC is considered somewhat...important. No, damage control isn't what it was in WW2: It's a helluva lot better.

Here are the docking locations of quite a few of them. It appears to be a completely unofficial site that just collects the information. It is just private individuals collecting information.