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British Aircraft Carrier For Sale On Auction Site
Hugh Pickens writes "Time Magazine reports that just in time for the holidays, the British Navy has put the aircraft carrier HMS Invincible up for sale on an eBay-like website. The proud 690-foot warship sailed Her Majesty's seas from 1980 to 2005, and took part in the Falklands, Balkans and Iraq campaigns. The ship underwent a major refit in 2004 but was decommissioned in 2005 with the proviso that she could be 'reactivated' at 18 months notice if a crisis beckoned but over the years her engines, pumps and gear boxes were cannibalized for use in other ships. If interested go to the auction site and put her to your 'wish list,' or add her to your 'cart.' Interestingly enough, the Australian government had originally planned to purchase the ship in 1982 but the Falklands war intervened and in July 1982 the British Ministry of Defence announced that it had withdrawn its offer to sell Invincible and that it would maintain a three-carrier force."
Fuck.
Not so invincible now.
ACTUAL SIZE!!!
I have an aircraft carrier in my freakin' shopping cart! I'm only two steps away from owning an aircraft carrier! God! I love the freakin future!
Obviously, anything made of that much steel, and capable of being tugged where you want it, has a floor value as a substantial amount of quality scrap; but I have to wonder if it has much more than that. Given its age and poor condition, refitting it will be fairly expensive and require some expertise. It also presumably lacks any refinements made in carrier design in the past 20-30 years.
Unlike, say, low end armored vehicles, for which there is always demand because even tinpot dictators have even more tinpot rebels to crush with them, aircraft carriers are sort of a "superpower or nothing" weapon. Unless you have the cash to maintain one, the air force to be worth projecting into blue water, and the support/defense/meat-shield carrier group ships to protect the thing, it is nearly useless to you. I would assume, therefore, that your standard "diamond/oil/cocaine/etc. kingpin who buys weapons because his country is a shithole with no internal industry" is basically off the table, unlike the case of some APCs or crates of RPGs or such. On the other hand, even if the ship is actually a good deal for some developing wannabe power, enough military procurement decisions are made as pork/spoils/makework deals that support for just buying the thing, rather than having some native shipyard build one, would seem doubtful, unless a country simply has no such capabilities.
Can anyone think of a buyer, without invoking Snow Crash?
she's too small for the PRC. They're going for carriers easily twice this size. I would have expected india to consider purchasing the ship (as they have in the past) but frankly, the invincible class is small, old and not the sort of thing of interest to the future naval powers. Spain has modernish carriers about the size of invincible, and those would be much easier to buy designs for. Though PRC doesn't need to learn to build carrier systems on this size when they have much bigger russian carriers already, and india is in basically the same situation.
The other thing is this isn't exactly a sale to the highest bidder. Basically the MOD is looking for the best value for the money they can get, and will assess from there. She might be broken up for scrap, if someone can throw together a good deal she'll end up a museum ship (though that would be presumably hard), or any number of other schemes.
I hope it goes cheap, the deck is warped.
Became a traditional name in the Royal Navy after the capture of the French 74 L'Invincible in 1747
The HMS Pretty-Good-All-Things-Considered was already in service with the Canadian Navy.
Now I see why formalin sensitivity is so common... a little exposure to you and I'm already irritated.
THL phish sticks
What's funny (in a non-humorous way) is that the US attempt to build a jump jet, that the UK plans on purchasing, is way behind schedule, over budget and having all kinds of issues. Which makes the Harrier, for all its warts, maybe not look quite as bad.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
The ramp is kinda neat. How come US aircraft carriers don't have one?
The Invincible class is designed to basically fly only one jet aircraft, the Harrier, plus helicopters. Harriers have a very useful quality for aircraft carrier operations: STOVL, or short takeoff/vertical landing. (They can technically take off vertically, but a fully loaded Harrier burns fuel so fast doing so that it's essentially an airshow stunt, not something practical to do for real missions. For the same reason, they tend to do slow landings rather than vertical, though it's not as bad by landing time since the airplane has expended most of its fuel and/or ordnance and is a lot lighter.) By doing a takeoff roll with the thrust nozzles directed partially downward to add some lift, the Harrier can take off at a much lower airspeed (and therefore a much shorter takeoff roll) than conventional jet aircraft of similar weight and engine performance.
It turns out you can shorten the takeoff roll even further if you add the ramp. This is nice if you're making small aircraft carriers on a budget, as the British were.
There are some carriers out there which use ramps for non-STOVL aircraft, but they're restricted to lighter planes with a high thrust-to-weight ratio.
The big US carriers are designed to operate a wide variety of aircraft, ranging from small and light to large and heavy. Not many of them are STOVL. Even with the long deck, the big ones can't possibly accelerate fast enough to be above stall speed before running out of deck. So US carriers use catapult-assisted takeoff instead. If you look at the launch area of the deck, you can see the catapult slots. There's a mating thingy which sticks up through the slot and pushes on the nose gear of an aircraft during takeoff. It's pulled along the deck by some very powerful machinery.
Heck, at that price Sergey could refit it so that he could have a "my yacht is bigger than your yacht" game with Steve Ballmer. Steve's yacht is only 126m. This is 210m. That's a lot of m's.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Hope your remaining sailor was unhurt.
Does the bid include free shipping?
Get it? shipping? eh, nevermind...
The Royal Navy has had five ships named "Invincible"
1. The first Invincible was a 74 gun ship of the line built in 1765. She was lost in 1801 during a gale after being driven ashore.
2. The second Invincible was another 74 gun ship of the line built in 1809. She was scrapped in 1861.
3. The third Invincible was a central battery ironclad (Audacious class) and was built in 1870. She sank in 1914 while under tow to a scrap yard.
4. The fourth Invincible was a battlecruiser (name ship of the class) and was built in 1906-07. She blew up following a magazine explosion at the Battle of Jutland in 1916.
5. The fifth Invincible is the subject of this article.
Your "fair share" is NOT in my wallet.