Modern aircraft carriers are hard to sink. But while they tend to travel with a group, you can’t guarantee one will be completely safe from enemy attacks. However, if a missile does hit a carrier, there’s a good chance the vessel will stay afloat. In fact, the U.S. Navy spent weeks trying to sink one of its own older carriers and failed miserably. The USS America was a Kitty Hawk-class vessel launched in the mid-1970s. After it was retired in 2005, the Navy decided to test just how much damage it could take. It turns out the answer was, everything the world’s largest navy could throw at it and a bit more. The carrier was eventually sent to the seabed when explosives were strategically placed inside it. This had to happen as external attacks were proving pretty useless.
The USS America didn’t have thick armor plating, but it did have advantages over its attackers. The first was a double-layered hull, which meant a good chunk of the ordnance used would explode without fully penetrating the ship. The amount of compartmentalization inside the ship also added to its durability. Anything launched at the vessel would need to go through multiple layers of spaced=out steel before it damaged anything significant. That compartmentalization also meant that the vessel could withstand an extreme amount of damage before it was flooded enough to go under. On top of everything else, the Vietnam-era vessel was very large — a lot larger than those used in World War Two. A bigger vessel displaces more water, and the more water a vessel displaces, the harder it is to sink.
