Buy Your Own Aircraft Carrier

Vodalian writes "Distinction as the last surviving Aircraft Carrier built in England for WW II and commissioned as the HMS Vengeance in late 1944, this unique vessel served the British then the Australian Navy as HMAS Vengeance prior to her sale to Brazil In 1956. Undergoing reconstruction and overhaul in Rotterdam from 1957 to 1960 she was commissioned as the Minas Gerais in December of that year. During her service with the Brazilian Navy she was overhauled from 1976 to 1980 completing a 5-year refit in 1981. She was decommissioned on the 16th of October 2001 and is currently for sale."

Snowcrash

[kiltedtaco]

Sounds like something right out of Snowcrash.

Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

My uncle bought an old Russian diesel sub. in 1996 for 150k he turned it into a floating restaurant on the Mississipi river.

Come on, Slashdot!

[Winterblink]

Lets put together a trust fund to buy this thing in the name of nerd news and matter-ful stuff. With the sizable readership of this site we could probably drop in a few bucks a piece to purchase it. :)

that's cheap

[luzrek]

And for only 4.5 million USD. If only I had that much.

Seriously, that thing would make one hell of a house. You could just more it up to a dock. Barge on the Seine my butt. I want an aircraft carrier in New York Harbor.

On second thought that would make one hell of a target for terrorists. Better put it somewhere in New Jersey.

floating server farm

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay 20-30 miles off coast.

Satellite internet access.

Web hosting outside the borders (Or DMCA laws) of any nation.

Isn't there an old oil rig that does this near britain?

Follow the hyperlinks...

[SkArcher]

and you will find that there is a charitable fund set up to buy this and turn her into a floating museum, as befits her place as the last surviving WW2 british aircraft carrier

A lot less interesting than the 'world domination' plans, but then, this carrier is outdated and wouldn't last 2 minutes against a modern navy, hence why it is for public sale.

Re:$4.5 million USD!

[Realistic_Dragon]

Thankfully new UK carriers don't have catapults, we switched to the ski jump style a while back which is much friendlier for the airframe and allows a greater take off weight, especially when coupled with BAE Harriers (or indeed a JSF).

Of course at one point we were even thinking of doing away with flight decks on carriers - there was an experimental sky hook system to catch a flying Harrier on a smaller ship. Thankfully abandoned due to sanity returning and the drugs wearing off :o)

Re:Business Model - Already Done

[Superfreaker]

Our crazy NY mayor Bloomberg is actually doing this already. He is taking old cruise ships and outfitting them for low-income housing.

I just hope they got rid of those silly hyper-contaigious diseases that were going around. Some 409 surface cleaner should do it. Well, a lot actually.

Re:build or buy ?

[meringuoid]

Seriously, if you're a minor country 'build or buy' is a serious issue. Building a carrier is bloody expensive, but if you do so you give at least one of your port cities a major employment boost and at the end of it you get a shiny modern carrier. Buying someone else's cast-offs is far cheaper, but you'll have to accept that it's a fixer-upper and pay for refits and awful maintenance bills.

The original owner of this carrier is currently starting work on two really _big_ carriers as part of a scheme to switch from a military geared to fight World War 3 on the Rhine to a highly mobile force capable of dropping in on people at short notice and spoiling their day. Consequently, three Falklands-vintage carriers will soon be on the market for any dictator on good enough terms with London... So if anyone's planning to buy this carrier, do remember that in a couple of years your neighbour could be planning to buy a whole fleet ;-)

So... COOL!

[LeoDV]

Seriously, if someone gave me $4,500,010 right now I would buy an aircraft carrier and a lot of candy.

A way to make it profitable would be to go around the world and offer paying tours. Or even cruises (though that would require a lot of people...) Enough to supply the fuel, pay back the loan you took out to buy it and fit it with enough computers and a network to run it all from the bridge, but most of all, have the COOLEST HOUSE ON EARTH.

...so...COOL...

Re:Put that baby on eBay !!!

[f97tosc]

Actually, this has precedence. A Swedish fighter jet of type Draken was sold on ebay.

The problem is that for these types of items the sticker price is usually only a small part of the cost of actually owning and maintaining one.

Tor

Re:It's already set up for soccer

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirelly true. Ive been inside this ship some time ago (about 4 years) whem my father still worked in the Brazillian Navy. The aircrafts that operated in this ship wherent from the Brazillian Navy, but from the Brazillian Air Force, so when it arrived for his port (the Navy base in Rio de Janeiro) the aircrafts went for his own base. The big space inside the ship was then converted in one soccer arena and one volley arena :)

Daniel Mendes

Re:Bring idea!

[AlecC]

See John Brunner's "Stand on Zanzibar" - an excellent book - in which something like this happened. A megacorp bought an aircraft carrier to use as a base for their take ove of "Beninia" - probably Gambia.

Re:Bring idea!

[AlecC]

I'd say "yes" - but it wouldn't do them that much good. National sovereignty is tolerated only if it doesn't cause problems to the Big Boys. The drugs people tried it with sundry Carribean givernments, and it became clear that it would not be tolerated. If a corp tries, via a foreign country, to upset the US national interests, the US would "fix" that country. Just ask Saddam Hussein.

Re:Bring good things to life

[Have Blue]

1% of the largest economy in the world is not exactly chump change. I'm sure GE is comparable to some of the smaller third-world countries, at least. I agree that that doesn't make them a superpower, and they aren't going to commit any acts of conquest while they're still part of the US, but it's not as impossible as it was a while ago.

(And let's not forget the British East India Company, which effectively owned the lower half of Asia for a while.)

Re:Offshore computing center?

[DNS-and-BIND]

You're probably thinking of an American Nimitz-class nuclear carrier, with its 5 acres of deck space and 5,000 crew. This one is WWII-vintage, and not quite so large. It's actually quite small, by aircraft carrier standards.

Re:Nice Price

[Ed Avis]

I hear that Sealand makes a profit... would it be possible to stick an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean and stick web servers on it? Perhaps the jurisdictional issues would be more complex than with Sealand.

Re:$4.5 million USD!

[The Mayor]

This is exactly why British aircraft carriers are completely ineffective. By going for a smaller (and cheaper) aircraft carrier, they have reduced the number of aircraft from around 90 to around 40. Recent conflicts have shown that it takes about 30-40 aircraft simply to provide adequate air support for one aircraft carrier. The result? You can provide air cover for your fleet, but you can't project air power. The aircraft carriers dispatched to the Falklands were never fully engaged in combat, and their air cover was even suspect (that, and a bug in their defence software didn't recognize the Argentinian Exocets as enemy targets).

Trust me, smaller aircraft carriers result in wasted money. The only country able to project significant air power from a mobile platform is the US, and this is only because they spend so f'ing much on each carrier.

Re:Big deal

[Anonymous Coward]

well he pretty much had to gut most of insides of the sub. It is dry docked by for publicity when it opened he had it towed up and down the river.

Re:What's in YOUR wallet?!

[afidel]

Why does everyone assume you need a crew of thousands for this thing. My dad was on an ore carrier that was larger than this and it had a crew of 23. And that crew included 3 cooks! Running and even maintaining this thing shouldn't take many people at all. Now operating the flight deck and maintaining a squadron of aircraft would take a bunch but just the ship would take a couple dozen tops.

Less Dense Water: the Bermuda Triangle

[handy_vandal]

How to sink an aircraft carrier:
Make its average density greater than water.

Alternately, make the water less dense:

A British scientist

claims [skeptics.com.au] to have solved the mystery of the Bermuda Triangle - and says the explanation could fix the world's energy problems.

Geologist Dr Ben Clennell told a conference that the phenomenon where planes, ships and people have vanished was caused by giant gas bubbles.

The gas bubbles resulted from underwater landslides releasing frozen methane gas which had built up over millennia. The methane ice "gas hydrate" was produced by deep-sea bacteria feeding beneath the ocean bed.

The effect of these apple-sized bubbles rising to the surface could be disastrous because the release of a large quantity of methane would reduce the density of seawater.

Search Google [google.com]

*Build* your own Carrier. No, really.

[Futaba-chan]

Someone I know has thought fairly seriously of doing just that:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Bolger2/files/Carrie r/ [yahoo.com]
(membership required, et cetera).

Canadian boat better and cheaper

[digitalgimpus]

http://www.frenchcreekboatsales.com/details.asp?Fi le_Number=PW852

The M.V. Cowichan
(pronounced) M V COW-ITCH-en

and affordable:

Reduced to $190,000(CDN) OBO

Boy, I guess it's safe to say they will never attack america.

Re:build or buy ?

[Guppy06]

"Building a carrier is bloody expensive,"

Putting planes on it is even more expensive. Especially when you're talking about a flight deck dating from WWII. Unless you're planning to go back to piston-driven aircraft, this ship will more or less require either a major overhaul or a plane specifically built for it. Add in the cost for a shipload of AV8Bs and suddenly the price triples (at the very least).

"Consequently, three Falklands-vintage carriers will soon be on the market for any dictator on good enough terms with London..."

It's probably cheaper to buy Falklands-vintage Exocets.