So there is an apparent conspiracy theory that the Ford was hit on the fantail by a Yemeni missile. The commenter who posted this theory here says the missile hit in the “open area near the fantail.” This is a picture of the ship arriving in Croatia:
The “open area of the fantail” is the jet engine shop, which is located on the first deck directly aft of the hanger bay. That’s where technicians repair the jet engines installed on the ship’s embarked aircraft. The ship’s laundry is 20 feet below the waterline on the sixth deck at frame 215, which is about about 160 feet further forward than the fantail. (In case you are wondering, the compartment is 6-215-1-Q My berthing compartment, the place where I lived for five years, was on the second deck, directly below that jet engine shop. Located below that on the third and fourth decks are the ship’s steering gear. Those steering gear rooms are vital to ship operation, and she couldn’t maneuver without them. For that reason, those areas of the ship are armored with fairly thick walls, and those are in turn surrounded by void compartments that are designed to be blown up to absorb the force of the explosion. I spent a year standing watch in those steering gear rooms as the aft steering gear electrician.
There is no visible damage to the area. This is the rather normal looking ass end of a supercarrier. Here is a picture of it in port. If you look closely, you will see a barge tied to the aft end of the ship. When a carrier is anchored in foreign ports, that barge is tied there to allow tenders to loan and unload, then people and supplies can be brought into the carrier through a ramp that is lowered from the rear of the ship. Sailors refer to that barge as a “camel,” not to be confused with the fire stations of the same name.
If there had been a weapon that hit the aft end of the ship, and it was bad enough to be a mission kill, there would be visible damage, and the ship would have needed more than 5 days in port. Not only that, but the crew would not have been granted liberty.
The world is watching, and there is no way that Yemen hitting the ship would have been ignored and suppressed by the entire world. In fact, it is a genius move for the Trump administration to have sent the Ford to Croatia- because it lets the world see that the ship was not suffering battle damage.
I get it- people want the US to fail. They want it so badly, that they will spread garbage like this. However, this fire was nothing more than the things that happen to a Navy ship that has been at sea for nearly a year of continuous operations.
A great example of the bullshit being tossed out there is this article. It shows the Ford in port and the reader is left with the impression that this is a picture of the Ford in Split, Croatia.
Except that isn’t Croatia, it’s Newport News Shipbuilding in Virginia. The earliest example of it I can find is from October of 2017. If you look closely, the port side CIWS isn’t there, no aircraft are there, and the area it’s in doesn’t even look like Split.
3 Comments
Tennessee Budd · April 10, 2026 at 6:44 pm
Damn, the island is far aft on those! I served on CV 59 and CV 67. Looks odd compared to my old ships.
Unknownsailor · April 11, 2026 at 4:36 pm
How sure are you that the ship’s laundry on the Bush is in the same place as it is on Nimitz class?
I slept in the 2-195-0L berthing twice, once on the GW and again on the Stennis. First time, that was the berthing we got as a VAQ squadron, and on the Stennis that was the Supply berthing.
The camel is tied to the stern on the Bush because the crew embarks/disembarks out a QAWTD hatch in the stern on 4th deck, I think it is. I don’t remember any stores or cargo going onboard that way, but its been a decade since I went ashore from the Stennis for the last time, so my memory may not be perfect. The Kitty Hawk had a big ole ladder that went down to the camel from Hanger Bay level all the way down; it had casters on the bottom so it could move when the camel moved in the waves.
Divemedic · April 11, 2026 at 6:47 pm
The exact compartment number, I can’t know. If you check out any publicly released photos of the Ford’s laundry, you will notice that they never include bullseyes or nameplates that would give that away. We have a few clues that point towards it being in the same rough location.
Laundry equipment is fairly heavy as they use 200 pound washer extractors and fairly large dryers. Along with the other heavy stuff in the laundry, this space is pretty heavy. In ships, the heavy stuff has to be low, below the ship’s center of buoyancy or the ship becomes unstable and will not want to remain stable or even capsize. The ship’s center of buoyancy has to be below the waterline, meaning that the laundry has to be on the 4th deck or below. It also has to be on the centerline.
At that level, the anchor and it’s chains take up most of the area of the bow. Similarly, forward air conditioning and refrigeration plant takes up most of the area aft if that, then there are some large magazines that have more than 10,000 tons of ordnance located in the intervening space. Add in the two reactor plants and their machinery, followed by the aft air conditioning and refrigeration space, and then considering that after steering gear has to be all the way at the ass end, and yeah, there isn’t much left for the laundry. It pretty much has to be in a similar location.
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