Couldnt you Survive on a Aircraft carrier?

[Gabe_dead]

Couldnt you survive on a aircraft carrier out too see or just anchored in the harbor and just go into land too forage for food?maybe preserve fuel by limiting the number of working planes and choppers and conver lowerd decks for housing. The reactor would last indefinatley. So what do you guys think? Assuming the infection was succesfully kept off the ships?

[Slain]

Aircraft carriers, and other naval vessels, would probably be converted into floating survival shelters for high ranking government officials--if they could reach American waters fast enough. I imagine there would be a great deal of resentment amount the crew over taking aboard a government big wheels while their families languished on the zombie infested mainland. Sailing on a war ship full bombs and AV fuel, with a bunch of pissed offed and possibly suicidal sailors is not something I would want to do. Casualties and desertions among forging parties going on ashore would no doubt be a serious problem.

A carrier battle group on a distance patrol station might not by able return to the U.S. before the country falls apart. The navy ships would probably return to their home ports to search for family they left behind. Scavenging enough food for thousands men from the wrecked, zombie infested cities wouldn't work for long though. Eventually the battle group would need to head to an island with a low population density and homestead the place. At this point the moored carrier would only be useful as power station and small manufacturing plant.

[SRP76]

just go into land too forage for food?

This right here is why none of these "hideouts" work. No matter where you are, where you hide, it boils down to having to face the masses eventually.

[Philly_SWAT]

Couldnt you survive on a aircraft carrier out too see or just anchored in the harbor and just go into land too forage for food?maybe preserve fuel by limiting the number of working planes and choppers and conver lowerd decks for housing. The reactor would last indefinatley. So what do you guys think? Assuming the infection was succesfully kept off the ships?

You should read the book "World War Z", which covers what happened to war ships in the zombie apocalypse.

[Gabe_dead]

What if you do a media black out, on the ships and make them think its not as bad as it seems, I picture turning some of the internal decks into a farming area maybe get soil , but they would have suitable weapons to defend themselves and a steady supply of water as they could make their own with a nuclear reactor, technicley they would never have too dock the carrier, just use some choppers and fast attack boats secure and area... build from that Idea another place I thought would be good, is the Prison from that Movie Last Castle, looks very defendable from a zombie invasion and towers too kills not even 10,000 zombies could knock down a castle wall, it would be dead weight...

[Danny]

1. do you know enough people to crew them, sometimes up to a few thousand for a massive one?
2. how do you stop it being corroded by the ocean salt water and naturally corrosive sea air and snapping in half, rivet city style if the outbreak is worldwide and lasts years.
3. you will need to keep coming back to land for food, and more so if you need to keep refueling the boat, if you can and know how so what's the point?


What if you do a media black out, on the ships and make them think its not as bad as it seems, I picture turning some of the internal decks into a farming area maybe get soil , but they would have suitable weapons to defend themselves and a steady supply of water as they could make their own with a nuclear reactor, technicley they would never have too dock the carrier, just use some choppers and fast attack boats secure and area... build from that Idea another place I thought would be good, is the Prison from that Movie Last Castle, looks very defendable from a zombie invasion and towers too kills not even 10,000 zombies could knock down a castle wall, it would be dead weight...

all of which would require time and prior knowledge long before any threat of a level that required you to take such action in the first place, which in the chaos of a worldwide event like that, one that required the need for such secure means in the first place would be too chaotic a situation to be able to garner enough control and coordination to get the job done at all.

[Eyebiter]

You could survive on an aircraft carrier for a while, at least until food ran low. Since the average super carrier has 5000+ crew on board, at some point it would be necessary to find a safe haven on land. Anywhere that is far enough from land to be free of the undead, good enough soil resources to grow crops, and a heavy enough military presence to hold off any undead that might appear.Long term could see much of the US Navy retreating to isolated off shore anchorages like Pearl Harbor, Diego Garcia, the Azores, or smaller islands like Bermuda.

[raptorman]

As an active duty naval officer, I can tell you that it might work for short while only. Your comment about the reactor... The fuel does not last indefinitely and it takes many trained personnel to operate a reactor. It's not a hands off operation.

Now the material condition of the ship: Carriers and other ships require large amounts of maintenance to keep them from rusting away. There is really no such thing as 'stainless' steel. It all rusts. Without the fleet of maintainers constantly needle-gunning the rust off the hull and applying primer and paint, eventually you will have serious damage.

When the reactor shuts down due to lack of personnel monitoring the systems (we're talking hours) you are looking at a floating piece of steel. Forget the aircraft. With the complex jet engines of the carrier airwing aircraft, you can kiss sustained air operations goodbye. Besides, you can't even launch aircraft without wind off the bow, and that is made by moving the ship through water with the propulsion of the reactor plants. Just not viable.

[EvilNed]

If the crew is above 1000, then you're in deep shit, really. Where are you going to find food and supply for 1000+ persons? In a world where the shopping malls are closed? The answer is: You don't. You eat your food, and then you starve. To feed that kind of crowd you'd need... millions of canned beans, to say the least. And about growing your own crop, you'd need a huge place for that. A place so big that you could grow enough food that would last a thousand persons a year, and more. We're talking alot of space here. And you're not bound to find anything that untouched.

Infact, if you were on a ship with a crew of a 1000 people, the first thing you'd want to do is just get the hell out of there. Because that's really no better than being in a city. In a week, or less, people are going to kill each other over what food is left when they realize they're not getting resupplied anytime soon.

[krakenslayer]

This right here is why none of these "hideouts" work. No matter where you are, where you hide, it boils down to having to face the masses eventually.

Very, very good point. However, I think that on an aircraft carrier, with some able-bodied men (probably several engineers), you'd be able to put together something reasonably self-sufficient and minimise the amount of time spent foraging on the mainland. You could fish for food, catch rainwater and also distil seawater to keep water supplies up, and with enough time and the right balance of productivity-to-manpower even convert most of the flightdeck into allotment-like areas on which to grow food. There is also likely to be plenty of opportunity to scavenge on the high seas - with all the yuppies and idiots taking to the sea unprepared when the outbreak began. Sure, there will be the odd "zombie ghost ship", but you're likely to be dealing with numbers fewer than those of your living crew. Of course, mainland scavenging is going to be neccessary at some point, but the trick is all about minimising your contact with the undead, and taking the fewest risks possible, you're never going to be able to avoid them altogether.

Also, at sea (particularly in the Pacific), there are many, many thousands of unpopulated islands, many of the hundreds of miles from the nearest land. You could do worse as a place to anchor your aircraft carrier...

http://academickids.com/encyclopedia/images/5/59/Atoll_pacific_300px.jpg

[Gabe_dead]

But in essence you could do it, with the right personel etc... i mean the carrier could be a floating fort... in harbor, no amount of zombies are going to be able to get on a carrier without a stairway or walkway, I have yet too see the zombie that can climb a ladder.... or maybe im wrong...the whole reason i ever brought this up , is because none of these issues were ever adressed in the romero movies...And Im not talking about the fake ass zombies from the
2nd dawn that are freakin olympic sprinters, im talking about the og dawn zombies that are slow and act dead...

[sandrock74]

Navy ships could use something like Alcatraz as a land base.

[Gabe_dead]

Nice point, Alcatraz could be a good base or Catalina island, wouldnt take much too clear out and island from a few hundred zombies...

[Slain]

First off, nobody is going to find an abandoned aircraft carrier sitting at its berth full operational and already to sail. The ship's officers would put a carrier to sea if they could, and destroy the vessel if they had to abandoned it. Harbors and shipping channels would be fouled with all kinds of debris, and navigating them with a large ship--especially without tugboats--sounds like an impossible feat to me. Harbors would also be incredibly polluted waters with dead bodies and toxin chemical runoff from wrecked industrial facilities, and I doubt there would editable fish in them for a century or so.

An aircraft carrier could be sailed to an isolate island or remote mainland anchorage, but then so could a much smaller vessel. I would rather be stranded on a small island or wild coastal area with a small group carrying a lot of supplies, than with a big group that had few supplies.

For fantasy purposes a moored warship serving as a floating museum (like the battleship Missouri at Perl Harbor) would make a nice sanctuary if the dead rose--certainly a much better hide out than a building on dry land. According to the Life After People show the Missouri would become a floating jungle all by itself, and would take 10,000 years for its hull to fully rust away without human maintenance.

[Gabe_dead]

Ok for fantasy purposes, Lets say the carrier group set sail before the outbreak, fully stocked and re-fitted... theirs your crew of experienced personal. Does that answer your question?