What do we get from our tax dollars?

[Travoli]

...The most powerful and lethal war machine in the history of mankind.

Weaponry is America's specialty, and we just set another benchmark. 18,000 square meters of deck and 100,000 tons of steel wrapped around *two* nuclear power plants. All for the low price of $13,000,000,000.
I was lucky enough to take a tour and see the commissioning. It'll be in operation longer than I will.

Please excuse the phone-quality photos. Security was rather tight, so I left the big camera at home.

[littleman]

A good investment?

[Travoli]

Hopefully it'll only have to prove itself a deterrent.

[rcjordan]

http://newatlas.com/us-navy-electromagnetic-railgun-field-deomnstrations/50631/

[Mackin USA]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=neDNY_ssHRk

[Travoli]

>electromagnetic railgun

The Ford class design replaced steam power with electricity wherever possible. The reactors pump out 3x the electricity of Nimitz class carriers. They don't need all that electricity now, but it's ready for future weapons.

Oh, the Ford's new electromagnetic catapults don't fully work yet.

[rcjordan]

Debbie says that in the age of swarms of weaponized drones, war ships are big, fat, obsolete targets.

[rcjordan]

US Navy lab tests "disposable" microdrones

http://boingboing.net/2017/07/26/us-navy-lab-tests-disposable.html

[Rumbas]

Holy sh!t.

Should be put into good use around the World imo.

[rcjordan]

>the Ford's new electromagnetic catapults don't fully work yet.

America's newest aircraft carrier uses "digital" catapult on fighter for first time

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/08/uss-ford-launches-first-fa-18-software-fix-for-catapult-pending/

[Travoli]

"coming in at three times its original contracted cost."

"A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon you're talking about real money."

[Brad]

Blue screen of death for catapult.


I don't care if there are 200 enemy planes headed toward us, the catapult crashed and we have to wait for it to reboot.

[rcjordan]

Damn! Impressive.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/9raoz0/railgun_round_goes_through_steel_like_butter_at/

[ergophobe]

Holy sh!t.

Should be put into good use around the World imo.

You must be Danish or something. That is NOT the American Way.

Perhaps the best return on our "military" money we ever got was the Marhsall Plan. The Marshall Plan cost 13.3 billion dollars, or roughly 103 billion in 2014 dollars (at which point the cost of the Afghan War was already $109 billion)
https://www.stripes.com/news/afghanistan-to-cost-more-than-marshall-plan-watchdog-says-1.295907

In 2016 dollars, the military cost of the Vietnam war ends up to be about $20,579 per person living in Vietnam in 1965 (789.5 billion for the war in 2016 dollars in a country of 38.34 million people). I always wondered what the result might have been if we had invested half that, $10,000 per person, in Vietnamese infrastucture and we had spent the other half on South American infrastructure or, God forbid, US infrastructure.

Keep in mind, those costs for Vietnam and Afghanistan are *marginal* costs. They do not include the cost of the basic military infrastructure that we have anyway. I also believe they do not cover veteran's benefits, disability claims, lawsuits around Agent Orange and so forth, but I'm not sure.

[littleman]

>Vietnam

We pulled out and 15 years later they're making Nike shoes.  Honestly, that place is the most capitalistic country I have ever seen.  I could hardly imagine what would happen if we gave them $20k/person and said "have at it".