Did you hear? Our latest nuclear-powered aircraft carriers use "digital" instead of steam to launch fighters.
For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, the next generation of aircraft carriers use an electromagnetic catapult system, rather than a 50-year old steam-powered system, to launch a wide variety of aircraft from fighters to drones.
The Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System (EMALS) allows a carrier to launch a greater number of aircraft per hour with heavier payloads while consuming less energy, but Trump is very upset about this because The Digital is not as "brutal" as The Steam.
I said, “You don’t use steam anymore for catapult?” “No sir.” I said, “Ah, how is it working?” “Sir, not good. Not good. Doesn’t have the power. You know the steam is just brutal. You see that sucker going and steam’s going all over the place, there’s planes thrown in the air.”
It sounded bad to me. Digital. They have digital. What is digital? And it’s very complicated, you have to be Albert Einstein to figure it out. And I said — and now they want to buy more aircraft carriers. I said, “What system are you going to be—” “Sir, we’re staying with digital.” I said, “No you’re not. You going to goddamned steam, the digital costs hundreds of millions of dollars more money and it’s no good.”
"What is digital?"
Now that I've recovered from idiocy-induced temporary paralysis, I'll point out that redesigning the next generation of carriers to use steam catapults would costs billions more because the entire structure of the ship would have to be altered to accommodate for the larger, heavier, and power-hungry steam system.
And you don't actually have to "be Albert Einstein" to understand any of this. Fortunately, I read about the new system years ago and again when the new USS Gerald Ford (the first Ford class carrier using the EMALS system) left dry dock, but you can learn about it in fairly short order. I mean, as long as you can read. I'm still not convinced Trump can read. He's barely literate.