The Ship Model Forum

The Mercy-class ships are large, with 1,000 beds, and can receive up to 200 patients a day. They are stable platforms suitable for performing most surgical procedures in various sea conditions. However, the main points of criticism of these ships are:

They are too slow, with a maximum speed of just over 17 knots. They are too large, and are not easily or quickly deployed or docked. Their size gives them a substantial radar signature that, combined with lack of maneuverability, makes them vulnerable to attack (which should not occur under the auspices of International Law). The Mercy class ships are much larger (in terms of medical capacity) than is needed for most military operations. That said, to attack a hospital ship is a war crime under Hague Convention of 1907.

While the ships are underway or in rough seas patients must be transported in by helicopter. However, helicopter capacities are limited, as each ship has only one landing pad.

Patient movement within the ship is limited. Built as oil tankers, the original oil storage bulkheads were retained, but have no hatches, which means that patients must be brought up to the top deck in order to be moved from a lower compartment in one part of the ship to another.

In mid-2004 Vice Admiral Michael L. Cowan, the Surgeon General and chief of the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, said that the Comfort and Mercy should be retired. "They’re wonderful ships, but they’re dinosaurs. They were designed in the ’70s, built in the ’80s, and frankly, they’re obsolete".

Few, if any, options are presently being explored to replace them with a platform better suited to the mission at this time.

I am a plankowner of the Kearsarge and I really like this idea. The problem with the design is that the support spaces and berthing spaces for the airwing are right below the flight deck and the hospital is the level below that. The ramp from the flight deck to the hangar deck has a large hatch at the hospital level but the angle of the ramp is so steep that I would not want to try to rapidly moving litter patients. There are weapons elevators from the below decks magazines to the hangar and flight decks and an adittional elevator from the hangar to the flight deck that can be accessed in the hospital. The vehicle decks are designed to efficiently move between the lower and uppper vehicle decks, the well deck, the hangar deck, and the flight deck.
My suggestion for this idea would be to add a conveyor system to the ramp (sort of like the power chairs for the elderly that are installed on home stairways) to safely transport intake to the hospital. The conveyor system would have to fold flat in the event that cargo needed to move from the vehicle decks to the flight deck. I would add an additional elevator or two to tranport patients from the hospital to the main deck berthing areas that I would convert to recovery wards. In practice the two deck edge elevators can be used for mass movement of non-medical casualties as well as equipment and aircraft.
I would keep the well deck because I would convert the landing craft to secondary medical facilities (think M.A.S.H.) and power and water filtration plants. The scenarios where this ship would be used would most likely include disaster recovery. The biggest addition I see needed to the exterior of the ship is portable causeways ALA the Newport class and additional small boats. The causeways solve the problem of damaged/destroyed port facilities and the extra boats are obvious because the Kearsarge only carries two RHIB's. Maintain the two magazines because they are perfect climate controlled storage for for medical and relief supplies.
Overall, I would say the volume, layout, and inherent capabilities of the Kearsage would make it an excellent disaster recovery vessel. I would maintain the full air traffic control facilities because that was one of the early problems with Haiti. The one are that I defer to the experts is power. The ship is steam-turbine powered with two emergency diesel generators. This seems like a perfect mini-powerplant for a disaster area. Some would advocate for gas turbine propulsion or even nuke but these choices would require serious modification to the ship. My theory is keep it simple but I'm sure somewhere out there is a different outlook.
I reallly enjoyed this what if exercise and hope that my input adds to the discussion.

As I mentioned in my opening post, I'm planning to convert a 1/350 USS Wasp amphib assault ship into a hospital/humanitarian relief ship as a What If concept. While the AH ships Mercy and Comfort are nice, there are no model kits of them.




The real Mercy and Comfort ships:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercy-class_hospital_ship
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Mercy_%28T-AH-19%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USNS_Comfort_%28T-AH-20%29
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ ... -schem.htm
.......are great in that they are large, can accomodate a lot of patients, and offer a lot of services. BUT......they have quite a few drawbacks:



A WASP class LHD or other similar converted vessel may or may not have nearly the patient capacity of the Mercy class, but an LHD does have a larger flight deck for expanded helo operations, and patients and cargo can be brought on board via the well deck with the use of LCAC's and LCU's. Also, there is this quoted post from one of the What If forum links in my original post:



Anybody have further thoughts to converting LHD's (or other similar vessels) into hospital ships?