You're viewing a single thread.
I kinda wonder why the billionaires only have super-yachts and not aircraft carriers
Helipads are pretty common as mentioned, but I've seen a few out there with storage for small planes. Those are usually some form of seaplane that just stores in/on the yacht after landing in the water, but technically...
I’m pretty sure that most of these hyper-yachts have helicopter pads. For transporting one person and their mistresses, it takes up a lot less topside real estate. The plebes can spend time on a boat between harbor and yacht if they need to get on or off.
aren't planes faster than helicopters though? I guess that doesn't matter as much though as the yachts stupidly spend time near coasts normaly, but I still find it weird that there are AFAIK no privately owned aircraft carriers.
Probably because a skeleton crew for one of those is an absolute shitload of people (Nimitz-class carriers have a standard compliment of 3,200, not including the air division, so pilots and mechanics and such).. and like sure you could probably get rid of some stuff and cut that in half, but it would still require a lot more staff than a super yacht (20-50 crew), including nuclear technicians/engineers and stuff which would probably be expensive.
Plus you’d be spending a ton to demilitarize and make the below-decks spaces comfortable, as that’s the vast majority of the ship. But in so doing, you may actually alter the ballast of the ship causing it to float higher and become unstable..
Why bother when you can get a status symbol custom made for you, you know?
The ballast/stability change never occurred to me. How about the draft for the bays and harbors you want to use with it? The harbormasters in Newport and Ibiza are not gonna let you rock on up to an anchorage to do some shopping.
Yeah, aircraft carriers are only allowed to dock at certain ports that are equipped to handle them. They are really quite large ships. Floating cities, really. They have more people on them than the towns I grew up in. Combined.. crazy, really.
The only reason I know any of this (beyond being in the navy; I was never on ship duty nor at a carrier base, tho I was 30 min from the carrier base in San Diego) is that for a while my zombie survival plan was to hijack a semi (which I don’t know how to drive), back it into a grocery and load it up, and use it to high-tail to one of the ports that docks carriers (which I also don’t know how to drive), and try to steal one. They have enough deck exposed to the sun to grow crops, and can lose enough internal equipment to make up for the weight of soil, making them workable for emergencies. So I’ve looked into it a bit.. That minimum number of crew is a huge deterrent to commandeering one for this purpose though, cuz I’ve met military boys, and they would absolutely be infected early on, unless they were on deployment during the outbreak, in which case they wouldn’t likely come back to shore..