Point of reference just to clear up the matter:

The Dolphin Class is actually a British design, build in Germany by Norwegian people using American money and in service with the Israeli Navy.

If you want a true multi-national project, this is the pinicale of the term!

Scoot, mate what will it take to prove this to you? We’ve been friends for a long time now and I would really hate to see you die of embaressment when she sails into Pier 19 on a good will visit to the US which is actually a show of strength and to rub it in the face of the world that they now have a carrier.

Nice pics, the Truman and the Nimitz look like they have just emerged from refits, note the new paint on the Nimitz and bothe decks still carrying test equipment.

Also note that the Truman is flying the Bravo and Hotel flags on the main mast, this means that she is live and flying helos same as Enterprise, yet Nimitz doen’t have any flying flags but has three helos on deck, note the open hanger, I would therefore say that Nimitz is doing deck handling trials with the three Seahawks.

Truman has a Seahawk on it’s deck but with all the other equipment on deck I’d say that she was under training ops.

The Big E has planes parked all over the deck including covering the forward cats, therefore is under landing training or touch and goes- the latter is more likely the case. As to where this is, I would have to say the mid atlantic training area off the Florida coast. The Nimitz and the Truman have been in dock on the east coast and are back at sea, the Big E is coming home after having spent some time on station in the Gulf and has been relieved.

Crob, that’s an old pic mate, see the primer colour on the island, compare it to the top pic which is the most recent.

Another thing I’ve been pointing out is the deception played many times by many nations, they paint the waterline higher, so you don’t get an accurate reading just looking at a pic. Best thing to do is to look at fixed points on the ship, the anchor port, the flight deck aft, the gangway around the outside of the flight deck. Now if you compare the latest pic with one of her passing through the bosphorus, you can clearly see a difference in weight on the water but not by much!

The weight mentioned by the Teipae reporter could be a miss leading one, remember there are many mailnad spies over there as well, and who better to sperad a line of disinformation than a reporter in Taiwan? IMHO Varyag is the carrier that they are going to use, question is, how sneeky can they be about it? I mean they have to know that the world is seriously watching them on this call!

55Heros: ok looking in my official guide, I see they mentione the fleet retrofitted the ski jump from 7* to 12* as fitted to R07, the interesting thing is that there is now R07 listed anywhwere, will get back to you on this

R05 Vince
R06 Lusty
R09 Ark

Who the devil is R07? I’ll get back to you shortly on this!