Reply to post: Re: That is going to be one hell of an expensive failure

UK getting ready to go it alone on Galileo

Anonymous Coward
Meh

Re: That is going to be one hell of an expensive failure

They didn't forget the catapults, they just had nothing to power them with, catapults need steam, the carrier is powered by gas turbines, no steam, they needed a nuclear reactor.

No, they don't *need* steam. It was just that between the 1910s and the 1970s high pressure steam was readily available because the usual way of propelling a large warship required lots of boilers. The first aircraft carrier catapults were actually powered by compressed air, not steam, and presumably something similar is still possible. There are chemical solutions too - e.g. German V1s, amongst other things, were launched by steam generated from hydrogen peroxide.

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