It also should be noted that while 30 knots isn’t that fast compared to airborne assets, it is still quite quick, and while carrier are big, the ocean is much bigger. Let’s say a Satellite spots a carrier. How long will it be before any ordinance can actually make it to the target? 30 minutes? A hour? Draw a 30 nm and 60 nm diameter circle in the middle I’d the ocean. The carrier could now be anywhere in that circle. Good luck finding a 4.5 acre dot in a 700 to 1400 sqnm (600,000 to 1.2 million acre) area. Not saying it’s impossible but it’s not as easy as it might seem. An airborne asset like a drone, MPA, or AWACS may be able to track it in real time, but that’s likely a sitting duck for a CAP armed with AIM-120Ds.
Max Q wrote:
So the USS United States remains the fastest big ship of all time
I think you mean SS United States, not USS, as the ocean liner was a civilian ship, not a military one. As far as which is faster, you have to look at sustained speeds vs maximum possible speeds. The SS US would beat a CVN Southampton to New York (because that’s what she was designed for) but I bet the CVN will make it from San Francisco to Tokyo or Hong Kong faster since the SS US probably doesn’t have TPAC range at 36 knots. However, just like with the carriers, there are lots of apocryphal stories about how fast SS US really was, with rumors that she could sprint at 40+ knots in war emergency power.
Either way, I remain in awe of the engineering achievement that SS US was. Averaging 36 knots across the Atlantic in a 50k ton ship without nuclear power is just incredible. Credit to the British as well. I love reading stories of how the Cunard Queens would sail without escorts during WW2 because both the destroyers couldn’t keep up and they were so fast it was virtually impossible for a uboat to ever get a firing solution on one.