Posted on 09/18/2014 7:11:25 AM PDT by C19fan
"Underway on nuclear power", radioed the skipper of USS Nautilus in 1955, after taking history's first nuclear-powered attack submarine to sea for the first time. Nautilus's maiden cruise left an indelible imprint on the navy. Her success, cheered on by the likes of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the godfather of naval nuclear propulsion, helped encode the supremacy of atomic power in the submarine force's cultural DNA.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
That was then, this is now.
Silent, yes, but they best pass on rolling coal.
It might have made them more cautious, and slowed down their time-table, giving local American commanders more time to refine their responses to the outbreak of war. My impression is that they were woefully unprepared.
I don’t know if it would be practical, but I always thought it might be interesting to build nuclear powered recharging subs - sort of like an oil tanker.
They could rendezvous with a diesel sub while both were still underwater, hook up some sort of power tether, and recharge the diesel sub without it having to come up to run it’s diesels.
Would definitely be a complicated system, probably more similar to a space docking than a refueling, but it would keep the subs from running on the surface unless it was safe to do so and could be done at a safe depth or even while on the bottom to make detection difficult, as it would likely make both subs vulnerable.
A nuclear recharging sub could even be pre-deployed and just sit in a known position at the bottom, not having to use propulsion, and then service a fleet of diesels in it’s area of operation, keeping them all charged up and undetectable from satellites and surface ships.
You might want to re-run your math on that one. Australia is talking about spending $20 billion for 10 Soryu subs. Link
The U.S. Navy just inked a contract for 10 Virgnina's for a total of $17.6 billion. Link
Sounds Like “A Plan”???
" Greater numbers, middling cost, a heavier punch in battle. That's a major contribution from such humble craft. U.S. submariners' diesel-propelled past "
We entered WWII with battleships and found out it was a carrier war. We may find WWIII is a sub war where a sub can launch a Intel drone, ID targets and take them out with cruse missiles all while undetected miles away. That makes large carriers very vulnerable. Its better to have many small carriers and lots of medium subs..
silent and deep is only part of the equation. Staying submerged almost indefinitely is the game changer. Diesels wouldn’t be able to do that. Nukes can and do....
We need about 50 such boats to augment our blue water nukes.
The littorals are no place for a Virginia boat.
Snorkel in water where the temperature gradient is favorable, and the nukes can’t find you. Trust me on this. Personal experience.
IIRC, the “fuel consumption issue” [of the Wankel] was exacerbated by emission standards [CA’s?] and Mazda’s solution was to up the fuel mixture [for the catalytic converter?], in turn increasing the issue.
My recollection is that we did just that with the old Barbel class boats (last D/E SSes in USN service, which had teardrop hulls)
We found that we got much more bang for our buck by buying nukes and leaving the D/Es to our allies (Japan, Taiwan, South Korea) who would have to fight beside us if the ballon went up.
Aircraft can. Personal experience as well.
Only 50? Why not 100?
Because there are not 1000 good targets in the world today.
Considering we have about 55 attack boats holding down the fort currently, 50 more for patrolling the South China and Yellow Sea, and, of course, the Persian Gulf ...would be MORE than adequate.
These DE boats are not suitable for Blue Water missions.
I served on WWII diesel boats in the early '50s. As a Sonarman, part of my duties were to maintain little smoked glass slides that were inserted into a device to measure the temperature of the water. On maneuvers, we'd take a test dive in the area, down to say, 200 feet. The skipper would watch for a jig in the scribed marking that would indicate a marked change in the gradient - in the Caribbean, it was usually 150 feet.
When we found the target, usually a convoy, we'd go in and shoot the Hell out of them, and when the destroyers came after us, we go below that gradient and let them conduct their futile searches. They never did find us.
A sidebar to that was that another part of my duty was to inscribe the Lat and Long, dip those used slides in varnish and send them off to some scientists in Washington. For all I know, they are still there in some basement.
i still believe a very efficient way to create inexpensive surface attack ships would be as follows: but some of the VRCCs wasting away outside of singapore, armor up the aft superstructure with battleship size armor, fill the outer tanks with seawater and add VLS for 200 SSMs and 100 SAMs plus some CIWS. these things wouldn’t look “cool” and wouldn’t provide jobs for congresscreatures but they could take a couple of SHIPWRECKs and continue to fight. NO BATTLEGROUP COULD DEFEND AGAINST 100 SSMs.
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