Biggest Ever

The Navy this week proudly released an artist's drawing of its new supercarrier. Unnamed as yet, the CVA-58 will cost an estimated $124 million. Though the money is still to be appropriated, the Navy has scraped together enough to start laying its keel by early 1949. From its decks, the Navy claimed, planes carrying the atomic bomb will be able to reach and bomb 92% of all possible targets anywhere in the world.

The new carrier will be the longest (1,090 ft.), and the biggest (65,000 tons) naval vessel afloat, and flat as a flounder. To reduce the ship's visibility and provide extra deck space, the lofty island of wartime U.S. carriers will be shrunk to two turret-like structures which telescope below deck level when not in use. The carrier's gill-like funnels are flush with the armored flight deck; it will have four catapults to fling its planes into the air. Like the 45,000-ton Midway-class carriers, it will be too wide (190 ft.) to get through the Panama Canal.

Like all carriers, the CVA-58 would not go it alone, but would have to operate as part of a carrier task force, to be accompanied by 16 destroyers (to provide a radar and antisubmarine screen), four to six cruisers for antiaircraft and surface support and at least two smaller carriers to carry fighter planes. The CVA-58 will probably carry about the equivalent of an Air Force bomber group, of which the Air Force has 16. One spread of torpedoes or a near-miss from an atomic bomb would put it out of action.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.