Posted on 08/23/2017 1:24:57 PM PDT by DFG
The first combat submarine to sink an enemy ship also instantly killed its own eight-man crew with the powerful explosive torpedo it carried, new research has found. The HL Hunley fought for the confederacy in the US civil war and was sunk near North Charleston, South Carolina, in 1864. Speculation about the crew's deaths has included suffocation and drowning, but a new study claims that a shockwave created by their own weapon was to blame.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
I always thought that was the case. They were on a suicide mission.....................
It was barely water tight as seen by how it had already killed previous crew members. So it didn’t take much.
Bad design.
Killed two entire crews and most of another.
Scientific article with math and numbers:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0182244
So it is no longer the CSS Hunley.
I was always impressed by the courage of the men who sailed her. I did a lot of crazy stuff in my youth but I would never have gotten into such an obvious deathtrap.
It’s only an obvious deathtrap to us based upon our knowledge of the evolution of submarines. Back when it was built, short of water pouring in through the seams, would you have had the same thought since it was “state of the art” and you were most likely living on the coast working on sailing vessels.
Was renamed shortly before as HunLEE
No wonder it was destroyed
If you thought as they did at the time perhaps you would have
Yea, I guess part of my bias is because I worked at a boiler-works one summer. They had me crawling inside of the boilers after they welded the end caps on so that I could chip the slag out.
I soon learned that I was claustrophobic as all get out!
There was a well-done TV movie about the Hunley.
First design. Determination as to "bad" comes from successive iterations, from which they had no benefit and they had no benefit of hindsight as you do.
Would you call the first automobile a bad design?
CSS Hunley ...
BLM Does not care, it killed some Confederates!
Back when the Navy had tactical nuclear weapons, there was a doctrine for shooting a target in an acoustic convergence zone. Not a great idea because the same conditions that allowed one to hear the target would focus the blast wave back to your ship.
Did the first three people to drive it die? ;-)
But seriously, there were other designs around the same time. The French and the Union both were trying something similar.
Were you a boilermaker? I’ve had to crawl into some pipes to weld them up and it was okay as long as I could see the light at the open end.
"The American engineer Robert Fulton built one of the earliest submersible craft in 1800 in France under a grant from Napoleon. A collapsible mast and sail provided surface propulsion, and a hand-turned propeller drove the craft when submerged. A notable feature was the copper sheets over the iron-ribbed hull. Despite some experimental successes in diving and even in sinking ships, Fulton’s Nautilus failed to attract development support from either the French or the British."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.