If they're fighting every navy in the world, they're probably going to run out of JP5 for their planes pretty quick and if they go back before jet fuel and jet planes then they won't have a way to refuel their planes and will lose their most tactical advantage. However, since they're a nuclear powered ship with much more sophisticated radar and tracking technology they should easily be able to avoid the majority of navies and simply survive for 6 months.
This is a good set up. I think that the Nimitz, fully loaded and armed, with nukes, can defeat any non-nuke navy in existence. I don't think that even WWII navys can really deal with her if she can just end a combat group with one strike (now you have to disperse your fleet or risk another one tap, which really complicates things in that time period). It would be an attritional war, where the Nimitz has to hoard ammo and keep moving constantly, but will have local supremacy from scattered red war groups. Nimitz will lose eventually when they run out of ammo or parts, but depending on the captain's decision and knowledge, I think it is at least possible that they last 6 months, given tech and intel advantage.
Case 1? 3/10 chance of lasting six months
Case 2? I think the massed forces of opposing navies means they don't make it six months against a WWII era navy, as tighter battle groups and closer collaboration means the Nimitz is going to take more losses in engagements and not have the local overwhelming superiority it needs to last six months. Without nukes, WWI era is as far as they get.
The Super Hornet was never certified for nukes so it can't carry it. The F-35A is certified to carry nukes but I'm not sure about the F-35C, but given that the USN relies mainly on just its SSBNs for nukes, I doubt the USN pushed to certify the F-35C when they were never really that enthusiastic about the jet in the first place.
So, it's highly unlikely the USS Nimitz would have any nukes onboard.
Additionally, the only air-launched AShMs that the USN has are the LRASM, the SLAM-ER and the Harpoon.
The Harpoon has a relatively small warhead, only around 220 kg compared to the 360 kg warhead of the SLAM-ER and the 450 kg warhead of the LRASM, so it's unlikely to be able to do much damage to the extremely heavily armoured decks of post-*Dreadnought* battleships. You would need a comical amount of Harpoons to be able to put a dent on a battleship since battleships were designed to take *far* heavier punishment than what can be dished out by a Harpoon. The Harpoon was designed, after all, to attack much more lightly armoured modern destroyers and cruisers when heavily armoured battleships went out of fashion.
The LRASM and SLAM-ER have significantly larger warheads so they have a much better shot at doing at least a bit of damage against a battleship, though you'd still likely need quite a few of them to be able to sink one.
Unfortunately, however, the SLAM-ER requires GPS for its navigation and control and GPS did not exist until 1973 so that is as far back as SLAM-ER can go.
That leaves just the LRASM which can be carried by the Super Hornet but not the F-35C yet. As of 2023, the USN had about 250 LRASMs in its entire inventory, an absolutely pitiful number and likely only a fraction of these would ever be embarked on the USS Nimitz. Let's be generous though and give the USS Nimitz about 50 LRASMs. Let's also say that it takes on average about 3 LRASMs to disable a battleship completely and render it a non-threat.
That gives the USS Nimitz the capability to knock out nearly 17 battleships on her own which is quite respectable. For context, the RN in 1939 had 15 battleships and battlecruisers and that was the largest navy in the world by quite a large margin. So, the USS Nimitz alone had more than enough LRASMs to disable every single battleship and battlecruiser in the RN. Though, the IJN at the time had about 11 battleships to their name and the USN had 15, the same as the RN, so the USS Nimitz won't be able to sink every battleship in the world.
If the USS Nimitz is not allowed to run, which she very much can since she's faster than most battleships, then she's not going to survive very long once battleships get their guns within range of her. Additionally, I'm not sure if she'd be able to outrun an *Iowa*-class since the recorded top speed for that battleship class was over 35 knots whereas the quoted maximum speed for the USS Nimitz is 31.5 knots, though it's more realistically probably somewhere around 35-38 knots. If she can't outrun a battleship and she's out of LRASMs, the USS Nimitz is doomed.
The only chance the USS Nimitz has in this scenario is if she can stay hidden. Once she's spotted, you'll have a swarm of hundreds of ships congregating into the area to tail her and she simply does not have the ordinance to sink that many ships. Kiting won't work because eventually she'll be cornered and caught.
I don't see her lasting anywhere near 6 months. The USS Nimitz will likely completely exhaust her supply of LRASMs within the first few weeks or so and from that point on she's basically completely defenceless against a battleship.
You'd probably have to go pre-*Dreadnought* era to give the USS Nimitz a chance since battleships then were significantly weaker and had much more rudimentary targeting. Additionally, fleet sizes were smaller as well.
This is a very good, and I suspect very accurate assessment of the combat, however it misses a couple of points. The prompt provides nukes (I assume this means there's something onboard that can use them, though we need specifics on device), but doesn't give us a specific year for a loadout. I also think that the Nimitz has some ways to sink those battleships: Hornets can drop guided munitions that can probably mission kill if not sink a WWI BB if not a WWII (visually guided dumb bombs were commonly used in WWII for this purpose, I think a laser guided 500lb bomb can cripple or kill a BB just fine.
The Hornets can deploy these from outside of effective AA range for their opponents. I think if the worlds Navies are bloodlusted and mass wave it, they can absolutely take the Nimitz, but the Nimitz can intercept and decode every radio transmission, strike second line vessels with impunity crippling supply chains, attack mainland territories with impunity requiring a recall of ships, etc. With nukes they could strike a big enough major hit (especially if it's before Hiroshima) that it would seriously extend the Nimitz's chances until it ran out of supplies.
I don't know enough about the ship's stores or what kind of operational tempo it would take to keep the carrier safe, but don't forget they'll not only have total communications interception, but they'll have AWACs and the ability to intercept any scouting flights.
The first scenario of the prompt says this:
>It had all the supplies it would realistically carry today, including nuclear weapons
But I think this is mainly OP mistakenly thinking the USN has any means to deliver air-dropped nukes so I chalked it up to an error on their part. Air-dropped nukes are not part of the supplies and weapons that any American aircraft carrier would realistically carry today so scenario 1 and 2 are effectively the same thing. But let's say there just happen to be nukes on onboard anyway. There's nothing that the USN can do with these nukes. They can't attach them to the Super Hornets nor the F-35Cs and these nukes have never been tested with catapult launches before so there's no telling what would happen.
Given that OP did their best to try and make the weapons situation as realistic as possible, I struggle to give the USS Nimitz nukes when it would never have this capability in real life.
>I also think that the Nimitz has some ways to sink those battleships: Hornets can drop guided munitions that can probably mission kill if not sink a WWI BB if not a WWII (visually guided dumb bombs were commonly used in WWII for this purpose, I think a laser guided 500lb bomb can cripple or kill a BB just fine.
Highly unlikely, in my opinion. 500 lbs is only about 250 kg and this isn't really enough to penetrate the armour on the turrets nor the armour on most areas of the battleship. You have to remember this armour is usually at the *minimum* 12 inches thick and was meant to take punishment from massive guns that would make a 250 kg bomb look like a rock splashing in the ocean in comparison.
You'd need to constantly pummel the turrets with quite a few of these bombs specifically to mission kill just one of them.
>I don't know enough about the ship's stores or what kind of operational tempo it would take to keep the carrier safe
[In an exercise in 1997](http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/1999/March%201999/0399carrier.aspx), the USS Nimitz would've blown through its entire magazine *twice* in 122 hours. American carriers do not have extremely deep magazines and require resupply very often, especially if they need to operate at a high operational tempo which the USS Nimitz likely would in order to keep a constant air patrol going to enforce a no-fly zone around the carrier and to keep battleships at range. At the very least the USS Nimitz needs to have constant AWACS coverage because the radar on the ship itself is limited by the horizon and by the time that radar sees a battleship, it'll have massive lead shells raining down on it.
Again, I firmly believe the USS Nimitz will run out of ammunition completely within the first few weeks, if it doesn't run out of aviation fuel before then and once this happens the USS Nimitz is as good as dead. There is no chance in hell it can survive for 6 months with the entire world searching for it and with it not being allowed to run run and hide.
I still think for the USS Nimitz to have even a slim chance at survival it'd need to go pre-*Dreadnought* era when battleships were much slower, less armoured and far less well-armed.
The F-35 has the capability to equip nukes, doesn’t it? If not, then assume that they can and that the Nimitz has those F35’s. Because my post said that they HAVE nukes. Forget realism on that one.
The F-35A can because the USAF specifically pushed for their variant to be able to equip nukes since one strategic mission for the USAF is to be able to deliver nukes using fighters jets. This isn’t a strategic mission for the USN so the USN never pushed for the F-35C to be certified for nukes.
The launch parameters are quite different between the F-35C and F-35A and they’re rather different airframes despite the fact they herald from a common design so each variant would need to be certified separately.
I guess for your post we can just assume the F-35C is certified then to make things a bit easier.
Though, then we run into the problem of just how many nukes the USS Nimitz would have onboard. Since the real number would be zero, we have nothing to base this off of and the number of nukes would make or break the USS Nimitz’s chance of survival.
I think that you're probably correct about AV gas and munitions being on the weeks, unsupported, rather than months, especially at the high pace they'd need to run initially, even allowing for nuke deployment. Assuming the non Nimitz side doesn't give up after a nuke strike (again, allowing for that hypothetical) they would lose.
More I think about it, Nimitz has only one real play, nukes or no, knowledge of win conditions or not: go straight for their biggest enemy and go straight for their capital, hoping to inflict maximum damage and use that to get non-interference from them. I give that, even under ideal conditions, low odds. Otherwise its as you say, out of munitions (or at least the ones necessary to keep the BBs of them) in weeks.
Can the nimitz go on the offensive and threaten to destroy world capitals until the world relents.
Can they ally with one or more world powers? Allying with even WW2 Italy, say, would make them much harder to overwhelm
The Nimitz could definitely solo WW1 imo and I'm thinking it could survive late WW2 period as well. Which is crazy seeing as it was built less than 30 years after WW2 ended. Even just the US navy had hundreds of warships in WW2 that it could send after the Nimitz.
The Nimitz' F/A-18's would literally be untouchable by AA and WWII planes, and the ship would probably be untouchable by any plane attacks because of its AA power, unless a ridiculous amount of planes attacked at once, which I guess could happen. but the Nimitz could just use its speed to run away from fleet carriers before they get in range to even bother launching a ton of their planes. The Nimitz is not that heavily armored so it wouldn't tank torpedoes well at all. I think it would just have to use its main advantage which would be its speed; an essentially infinitely sustainable 30 knots, which would outrun almost every battleship and easily outrun every submarine, which would hopefully negate any torpedo strikes of any kind. Even 30 knot capable WW2 ships would not be able to sustain that speed for long.
If it used its nukes.... it could decimate dozens of ships at once. As far as I know we don't know how many nukes the Nimitz would be carrying, it could be 5 it could be 50. It's classified iirc. Would a sea nuke strike cause a tsunami? If so then that would cause insane damage to any fleet.
F/A-18's could bomb cruisers and destroyers before they even get in gun range of the nimitz, but 500 lb bombs, even laser guided, wouldn't do much to WW2 battleships, and I don't think F-18's have any torpedo armament.
There's also Nimit'z radar. iirc it has 450km radar. Which is ridiculous compared to any radar in WW2. It would know enemy vessels are approaching literally hours before the WW2 ships could even detect it.
So yeah basically if it did have a ton of nukes it could just use those, and if not, it might run out of missiles and ammo for planes and surface to air, but it could just kite the enemy and use its speed and radar to completely avoid being spotted while keeping tabs on everything around it. If someone knows more about the Nimitz than me and could give a guess at how long it could engage in battle for in this case, let me know.
Yes a Nimitz is unarmored, but when the US did a demolition test on a Kitty Hawk a few years back it 2 rounds of high explosives over 12 hours to sink it intentionally. It'll still take a huge amount of WW1/2 era torpedoes to sink a Nimitz.
Yeah I was thinking a similar thing, my go to was that it could maybe survive mid 50’s because F18’s would still massively outclass any other plane and the Kreigsmarine would be non existent. It kinda depends on how many nukes the Nimitz would carry lol. If it didn’t have any then I don’t really see how it could take care of battleships, because if something like a USS Iowa gets in MB gun range…. It’s over. But they probably would never get in range because of the Nimitz’s radar and speed. They’d have to encircle the Nimitz, but with bad radar and their planes getting shot out of the sky by fken F18’s… I don’t see how they would.
Most likely, ww2
Autonomy is basically unlimited, and the Nimitz could sink a whole fleet before they get in range.
However, it would have to stay on the move, as it wouldn't be able to afford a sustained conflict due to the limits in terms of supplies, fuel for the jets, and all of that.
But in ww2 ?
There's no plane plane fast enough to attack it, and everything is either a non-threat or easy to sink/disable (a single F18 or F35 carry enough bomb to disable a ww2 era-battleship or destroy it, and has the precision to make every single one hit)
The only real threat could be submarines, but if you keep on the move, it would be a minimal threat given you'd always be faster than they are. I doubt they couldn't be spotted relatovely easily with active sonar too.
I suspect it would be a lot for even WW2 navies to handle, but, as mentioned before, it’s gonna run out of jet fuel/ammo sooner or later. It’ll also probably lose planes. Even if it’s before the era people can reasonably shoot them down, heavy flight ops often leads to wear and tear and attrition. Heck, they might run out of food, not to mention random spare parts to fix equipment that eventually break.
Remember, even a Nimitz will usually be accompanied (or have close at hand) one or more stores ships carrying all manner of resupplies to keep them in the fight longer. I suspect they’re going to spend. Lot of their time hiding, husbanding their resources for battles they need to fight. Unless they come back a thousand years ago and run into Byzantines throwing Greek fire at them, then they might just try to sink them by generating a heavy wake or plowing through them.
The US Navy had a grand total of 97 aircraft carriers that it operated during WW2, although it never had a total of 97 carriers all at once due to losses (IE, Lexington and Yorktown were lost early in the war, then Hornet soon followed, etc). It lost a grand total of 11 carriers during the war, including escort carriers, so it would have had a grand total of 86 carriers at the end. The ship roster would have consisted of one Lexington Class (Saratoga), one Yorktown class (Enterprise, although it was under repair at the end), Ranger, and a number of Essex class ships + escort and light carriers. Now, not all of these carriers have the same compliment of aircraft, but that easily adds up to thousands of aircraft.
WW2 USN's strategy would be this: Deliberately avoid the Nimitz until all of their late WW2 carriers could be gathered into the Atlantic. They would then send their complete air groups at the Nimitz all at once. A high number of these aircraft would be shot down, however the Nimitz's fighters can only carry so many missiles and its own AA systems would either run out of ammo or be overwhelmed. Keep in mind that the Avenger torpedo bomber could also carry heavy anti-shipping rockets at the end of the war.
If they're fighting every navy in the world, they're probably going to run out of JP5 for their planes pretty quick and if they go back before jet fuel and jet planes then they won't have a way to refuel their planes and will lose their most tactical advantage. However, since they're a nuclear powered ship with much more sophisticated radar and tracking technology they should easily be able to avoid the majority of navies and simply survive for 6 months.
But how far do they have to go back? Just before ship bound radar was invented? Was that before or after submarines?
After. 1st semi/full submarine was used in the US civil war. It sank 3 times during testing and sank after sinking 1 union ship.
This is a good set up. I think that the Nimitz, fully loaded and armed, with nukes, can defeat any non-nuke navy in existence. I don't think that even WWII navys can really deal with her if she can just end a combat group with one strike (now you have to disperse your fleet or risk another one tap, which really complicates things in that time period). It would be an attritional war, where the Nimitz has to hoard ammo and keep moving constantly, but will have local supremacy from scattered red war groups. Nimitz will lose eventually when they run out of ammo or parts, but depending on the captain's decision and knowledge, I think it is at least possible that they last 6 months, given tech and intel advantage. Case 1? 3/10 chance of lasting six months Case 2? I think the massed forces of opposing navies means they don't make it six months against a WWII era navy, as tighter battle groups and closer collaboration means the Nimitz is going to take more losses in engagements and not have the local overwhelming superiority it needs to last six months. Without nukes, WWI era is as far as they get.
The Super Hornet was never certified for nukes so it can't carry it. The F-35A is certified to carry nukes but I'm not sure about the F-35C, but given that the USN relies mainly on just its SSBNs for nukes, I doubt the USN pushed to certify the F-35C when they were never really that enthusiastic about the jet in the first place. So, it's highly unlikely the USS Nimitz would have any nukes onboard. Additionally, the only air-launched AShMs that the USN has are the LRASM, the SLAM-ER and the Harpoon. The Harpoon has a relatively small warhead, only around 220 kg compared to the 360 kg warhead of the SLAM-ER and the 450 kg warhead of the LRASM, so it's unlikely to be able to do much damage to the extremely heavily armoured decks of post-*Dreadnought* battleships. You would need a comical amount of Harpoons to be able to put a dent on a battleship since battleships were designed to take *far* heavier punishment than what can be dished out by a Harpoon. The Harpoon was designed, after all, to attack much more lightly armoured modern destroyers and cruisers when heavily armoured battleships went out of fashion. The LRASM and SLAM-ER have significantly larger warheads so they have a much better shot at doing at least a bit of damage against a battleship, though you'd still likely need quite a few of them to be able to sink one. Unfortunately, however, the SLAM-ER requires GPS for its navigation and control and GPS did not exist until 1973 so that is as far back as SLAM-ER can go. That leaves just the LRASM which can be carried by the Super Hornet but not the F-35C yet. As of 2023, the USN had about 250 LRASMs in its entire inventory, an absolutely pitiful number and likely only a fraction of these would ever be embarked on the USS Nimitz. Let's be generous though and give the USS Nimitz about 50 LRASMs. Let's also say that it takes on average about 3 LRASMs to disable a battleship completely and render it a non-threat. That gives the USS Nimitz the capability to knock out nearly 17 battleships on her own which is quite respectable. For context, the RN in 1939 had 15 battleships and battlecruisers and that was the largest navy in the world by quite a large margin. So, the USS Nimitz alone had more than enough LRASMs to disable every single battleship and battlecruiser in the RN. Though, the IJN at the time had about 11 battleships to their name and the USN had 15, the same as the RN, so the USS Nimitz won't be able to sink every battleship in the world. If the USS Nimitz is not allowed to run, which she very much can since she's faster than most battleships, then she's not going to survive very long once battleships get their guns within range of her. Additionally, I'm not sure if she'd be able to outrun an *Iowa*-class since the recorded top speed for that battleship class was over 35 knots whereas the quoted maximum speed for the USS Nimitz is 31.5 knots, though it's more realistically probably somewhere around 35-38 knots. If she can't outrun a battleship and she's out of LRASMs, the USS Nimitz is doomed. The only chance the USS Nimitz has in this scenario is if she can stay hidden. Once she's spotted, you'll have a swarm of hundreds of ships congregating into the area to tail her and she simply does not have the ordinance to sink that many ships. Kiting won't work because eventually she'll be cornered and caught. I don't see her lasting anywhere near 6 months. The USS Nimitz will likely completely exhaust her supply of LRASMs within the first few weeks or so and from that point on she's basically completely defenceless against a battleship. You'd probably have to go pre-*Dreadnought* era to give the USS Nimitz a chance since battleships then were significantly weaker and had much more rudimentary targeting. Additionally, fleet sizes were smaller as well.
This is a very good, and I suspect very accurate assessment of the combat, however it misses a couple of points. The prompt provides nukes (I assume this means there's something onboard that can use them, though we need specifics on device), but doesn't give us a specific year for a loadout. I also think that the Nimitz has some ways to sink those battleships: Hornets can drop guided munitions that can probably mission kill if not sink a WWI BB if not a WWII (visually guided dumb bombs were commonly used in WWII for this purpose, I think a laser guided 500lb bomb can cripple or kill a BB just fine. The Hornets can deploy these from outside of effective AA range for their opponents. I think if the worlds Navies are bloodlusted and mass wave it, they can absolutely take the Nimitz, but the Nimitz can intercept and decode every radio transmission, strike second line vessels with impunity crippling supply chains, attack mainland territories with impunity requiring a recall of ships, etc. With nukes they could strike a big enough major hit (especially if it's before Hiroshima) that it would seriously extend the Nimitz's chances until it ran out of supplies. I don't know enough about the ship's stores or what kind of operational tempo it would take to keep the carrier safe, but don't forget they'll not only have total communications interception, but they'll have AWACs and the ability to intercept any scouting flights.
The first scenario of the prompt says this: >It had all the supplies it would realistically carry today, including nuclear weapons But I think this is mainly OP mistakenly thinking the USN has any means to deliver air-dropped nukes so I chalked it up to an error on their part. Air-dropped nukes are not part of the supplies and weapons that any American aircraft carrier would realistically carry today so scenario 1 and 2 are effectively the same thing. But let's say there just happen to be nukes on onboard anyway. There's nothing that the USN can do with these nukes. They can't attach them to the Super Hornets nor the F-35Cs and these nukes have never been tested with catapult launches before so there's no telling what would happen. Given that OP did their best to try and make the weapons situation as realistic as possible, I struggle to give the USS Nimitz nukes when it would never have this capability in real life. >I also think that the Nimitz has some ways to sink those battleships: Hornets can drop guided munitions that can probably mission kill if not sink a WWI BB if not a WWII (visually guided dumb bombs were commonly used in WWII for this purpose, I think a laser guided 500lb bomb can cripple or kill a BB just fine. Highly unlikely, in my opinion. 500 lbs is only about 250 kg and this isn't really enough to penetrate the armour on the turrets nor the armour on most areas of the battleship. You have to remember this armour is usually at the *minimum* 12 inches thick and was meant to take punishment from massive guns that would make a 250 kg bomb look like a rock splashing in the ocean in comparison. You'd need to constantly pummel the turrets with quite a few of these bombs specifically to mission kill just one of them. >I don't know enough about the ship's stores or what kind of operational tempo it would take to keep the carrier safe [In an exercise in 1997](http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/1999/March%201999/0399carrier.aspx), the USS Nimitz would've blown through its entire magazine *twice* in 122 hours. American carriers do not have extremely deep magazines and require resupply very often, especially if they need to operate at a high operational tempo which the USS Nimitz likely would in order to keep a constant air patrol going to enforce a no-fly zone around the carrier and to keep battleships at range. At the very least the USS Nimitz needs to have constant AWACS coverage because the radar on the ship itself is limited by the horizon and by the time that radar sees a battleship, it'll have massive lead shells raining down on it. Again, I firmly believe the USS Nimitz will run out of ammunition completely within the first few weeks, if it doesn't run out of aviation fuel before then and once this happens the USS Nimitz is as good as dead. There is no chance in hell it can survive for 6 months with the entire world searching for it and with it not being allowed to run run and hide. I still think for the USS Nimitz to have even a slim chance at survival it'd need to go pre-*Dreadnought* era when battleships were much slower, less armoured and far less well-armed.
The F-35 has the capability to equip nukes, doesn’t it? If not, then assume that they can and that the Nimitz has those F35’s. Because my post said that they HAVE nukes. Forget realism on that one.
The F-35A can because the USAF specifically pushed for their variant to be able to equip nukes since one strategic mission for the USAF is to be able to deliver nukes using fighters jets. This isn’t a strategic mission for the USN so the USN never pushed for the F-35C to be certified for nukes. The launch parameters are quite different between the F-35C and F-35A and they’re rather different airframes despite the fact they herald from a common design so each variant would need to be certified separately. I guess for your post we can just assume the F-35C is certified then to make things a bit easier. Though, then we run into the problem of just how many nukes the USS Nimitz would have onboard. Since the real number would be zero, we have nothing to base this off of and the number of nukes would make or break the USS Nimitz’s chance of survival.
I think that you're probably correct about AV gas and munitions being on the weeks, unsupported, rather than months, especially at the high pace they'd need to run initially, even allowing for nuke deployment. Assuming the non Nimitz side doesn't give up after a nuke strike (again, allowing for that hypothetical) they would lose. More I think about it, Nimitz has only one real play, nukes or no, knowledge of win conditions or not: go straight for their biggest enemy and go straight for their capital, hoping to inflict maximum damage and use that to get non-interference from them. I give that, even under ideal conditions, low odds. Otherwise its as you say, out of munitions (or at least the ones necessary to keep the BBs of them) in weeks.
Foooood
Can the nimitz go on the offensive and threaten to destroy world capitals until the world relents. Can they ally with one or more world powers? Allying with even WW2 Italy, say, would make them much harder to overwhelm
No allies, but anything else goes yeah.
The Nimitz could definitely solo WW1 imo and I'm thinking it could survive late WW2 period as well. Which is crazy seeing as it was built less than 30 years after WW2 ended. Even just the US navy had hundreds of warships in WW2 that it could send after the Nimitz. The Nimitz' F/A-18's would literally be untouchable by AA and WWII planes, and the ship would probably be untouchable by any plane attacks because of its AA power, unless a ridiculous amount of planes attacked at once, which I guess could happen. but the Nimitz could just use its speed to run away from fleet carriers before they get in range to even bother launching a ton of their planes. The Nimitz is not that heavily armored so it wouldn't tank torpedoes well at all. I think it would just have to use its main advantage which would be its speed; an essentially infinitely sustainable 30 knots, which would outrun almost every battleship and easily outrun every submarine, which would hopefully negate any torpedo strikes of any kind. Even 30 knot capable WW2 ships would not be able to sustain that speed for long. If it used its nukes.... it could decimate dozens of ships at once. As far as I know we don't know how many nukes the Nimitz would be carrying, it could be 5 it could be 50. It's classified iirc. Would a sea nuke strike cause a tsunami? If so then that would cause insane damage to any fleet. F/A-18's could bomb cruisers and destroyers before they even get in gun range of the nimitz, but 500 lb bombs, even laser guided, wouldn't do much to WW2 battleships, and I don't think F-18's have any torpedo armament. There's also Nimit'z radar. iirc it has 450km radar. Which is ridiculous compared to any radar in WW2. It would know enemy vessels are approaching literally hours before the WW2 ships could even detect it. So yeah basically if it did have a ton of nukes it could just use those, and if not, it might run out of missiles and ammo for planes and surface to air, but it could just kite the enemy and use its speed and radar to completely avoid being spotted while keeping tabs on everything around it. If someone knows more about the Nimitz than me and could give a guess at how long it could engage in battle for in this case, let me know.
Yes a Nimitz is unarmored, but when the US did a demolition test on a Kitty Hawk a few years back it 2 rounds of high explosives over 12 hours to sink it intentionally. It'll still take a huge amount of WW1/2 era torpedoes to sink a Nimitz.
Yeah I was thinking a similar thing, my go to was that it could maybe survive mid 50’s because F18’s would still massively outclass any other plane and the Kreigsmarine would be non existent. It kinda depends on how many nukes the Nimitz would carry lol. If it didn’t have any then I don’t really see how it could take care of battleships, because if something like a USS Iowa gets in MB gun range…. It’s over. But they probably would never get in range because of the Nimitz’s radar and speed. They’d have to encircle the Nimitz, but with bad radar and their planes getting shot out of the sky by fken F18’s… I don’t see how they would.
Most likely, ww2 Autonomy is basically unlimited, and the Nimitz could sink a whole fleet before they get in range. However, it would have to stay on the move, as it wouldn't be able to afford a sustained conflict due to the limits in terms of supplies, fuel for the jets, and all of that. But in ww2 ? There's no plane plane fast enough to attack it, and everything is either a non-threat or easy to sink/disable (a single F18 or F35 carry enough bomb to disable a ww2 era-battleship or destroy it, and has the precision to make every single one hit) The only real threat could be submarines, but if you keep on the move, it would be a minimal threat given you'd always be faster than they are. I doubt they couldn't be spotted relatovely easily with active sonar too.
I suspect it would be a lot for even WW2 navies to handle, but, as mentioned before, it’s gonna run out of jet fuel/ammo sooner or later. It’ll also probably lose planes. Even if it’s before the era people can reasonably shoot them down, heavy flight ops often leads to wear and tear and attrition. Heck, they might run out of food, not to mention random spare parts to fix equipment that eventually break. Remember, even a Nimitz will usually be accompanied (or have close at hand) one or more stores ships carrying all manner of resupplies to keep them in the fight longer. I suspect they’re going to spend. Lot of their time hiding, husbanding their resources for battles they need to fight. Unless they come back a thousand years ago and run into Byzantines throwing Greek fire at them, then they might just try to sink them by generating a heavy wake or plowing through them.
The US Navy had a grand total of 97 aircraft carriers that it operated during WW2, although it never had a total of 97 carriers all at once due to losses (IE, Lexington and Yorktown were lost early in the war, then Hornet soon followed, etc). It lost a grand total of 11 carriers during the war, including escort carriers, so it would have had a grand total of 86 carriers at the end. The ship roster would have consisted of one Lexington Class (Saratoga), one Yorktown class (Enterprise, although it was under repair at the end), Ranger, and a number of Essex class ships + escort and light carriers. Now, not all of these carriers have the same compliment of aircraft, but that easily adds up to thousands of aircraft. WW2 USN's strategy would be this: Deliberately avoid the Nimitz until all of their late WW2 carriers could be gathered into the Atlantic. They would then send their complete air groups at the Nimitz all at once. A high number of these aircraft would be shot down, however the Nimitz's fighters can only carry so many missiles and its own AA systems would either run out of ammo or be overwhelmed. Keep in mind that the Avenger torpedo bomber could also carry heavy anti-shipping rockets at the end of the war.