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Kursk Destroyed By Cavitation Missles?
A reader submitted: "One of Russia's biggest independent TV networks, NTV, broadcast at about 22:20pm that the developers of the Shkval torpedo system (which was discussed here on July 23rd) claim that Kursk was testing their torpedoes, and one of them accidentially homed on the sub itself. It was also mentioned that the torpedo can travel at the speed of 200 knots. What could it mean to the development of the supersonic underwater devices? It seems that even before corporations get to science, blood does." I just saw this on the news as well, and a number of readers submitted this over the last few days.
Didn't they learn anything from Hunt for Red October?
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Since a fast torpedo goes fast and turns slowly -- I doubt that it got turned around.
More likely they've got the same problems that plagued the US torpedo inventory during the 50's and 60's. Namely, spontaneous arming. One of the US subs was lost in the Atlantic owing to a torpedo that armed itself in the tube.
Hope the engineer that built that one feels at least slightly guilty.
torpedo 127.0.0.1
and kaboom!
sulli
sulli
RTFJ.
I had a feeling the Russians were testing something. Otherwise why would they release so much disinformation to keep everyone away until they ran out of options (made sure there wasn't anything noticable)?
The fact that the disinformation came from the higher-ups makes the case stronger. I mean, how would the Secretary of the Navy KNOW everyone is dead, please go away? But he sure would know what was going on and want to keep everyone away. I'll be really surprised if the salvage effort goes ahead if there is anything left of the front of that sub.
slightly related, did I hear correctly that the explosion was heard as a 3 on the Richter scale, or did I just dream that up again?
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a BOD.
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To: Admiral Xinablutznuk (phb@kremvax.org)
Subject: homing circuit
Date: 8, October, 1999
Hey, like, dude, we just, like, wanted to let you know that, uhh, there's a bug, well, a really small one, in the guidance system. If you, uhh, point the torpedo at yourself, it will, you know.. do it's thing...
Probably nothing though, we fixed it by putting a sign on the side of the launcher that says "Point this side towards enemy"..
From: Admiral Xinablutznuk (phb@kremvax.org)
To: Engineering Team (techgods@kremvax.org)
Subject: homing circuit
Date: 21, Jun, 2000
Das, are you thinkink we are stupid? Remove the sign, our sailors know this!
Remember
Torpedoes don't kill people... People kill people
I actually have a few issues with NTV, from the filtered, poorly translated material that I see from them they don't really seem to know what is going on. It might be the fact that you can't seem to get a straight answer out of the Russian government or it might be incompetent news people. I'll wait a little before I give this report credability.
It is a shame that people have to die in the name of science but sometimes things just need to be tested first hand. Think about the first person to eat an egg... or the first person who found out that cyanide kills.
___________________
He who laughs last... Thinks slowest
Beacause those torpedoes are actually underwater missilles with over 2 mach speed. Imagine what kind of a circle it would have to make before hitting the mothership. Possible that an another boat fired a torpedo and by accident got Kursk.
First their were reports that the Kursk crew was tapping on the hull, then there were numerous false reports due to speculation about why it sunk. From the Norwegian video and examination the submarine was most likely destroyed by a missle being detonated in the forward part of the hull. This happened to a US sub in 1968 and wasn't the first time for a Russian sub.
It's more like geeks at sea...
GeekQuest DSV, anyone?
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I think it is sad that a country with so many social and financial problems keeps clinging to their cold war mindset. Does russia really need nuclear subs nowadays? I would seem to think that money spent on their military program could maybe be better spent bringing the country back together. Last I heard, Russia (of whatever the country is called today,) had problems even paying its soldiers. It is such a suprise they are having accidents with their nuclear subs, which testing new "state of the art" torpedos? -Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
The long and the short of it is this: Shkval can't be steered, so they couldn't have fired on themselves.
Anybody want to start a betting pool ***(pun)*** on just how long before covert US Navy SEAL divers are roaming up and down the flooded passageways of this sub? It has never-before-seen surface-to-surface missiles designed to take out US aircraft carriers, maybe warp-speed torpedos, certainly top-of-the-line Russian crypto gear, in only 350 feet of international water. Project Jennifer raised a sub from miles down back in the early 70s, and a Russian boomer that sank due to internal fire off the coast of Bermuda in 1986 in thousands of feet of water mysteriously had the missile hatches peeled open and several missiles gone when a follow-on Russian oceanographic expedition photographed it a few months later. Hmm, wonder who did that? The Kursk is a piece of (very tempting) cake in comparison...
It's really hard to tell what happened, but I seriously doubt a torpedo detonation was responsible for the initial explosion. Two explosions were heard by Norway and the U.S. The first one was (relatively) small - smaller than a sub torpedo. It was followed by a second larger blast - more powerful than a single torpedo.
;)
Submarine torpedos are designed to arm after they've travelled some distance from the boat. I can't imagine a scenario where one would detonate in the tube.
More likely, there was some other cause for the initial explosion. This could be any number of things -- buildup and ignition of hazardous gas or torpedo fuel, hydrogen exploding in the battery compartment, or perhaps even hitting a mine. Whatever happened, it seemed to have set off the rest of the torpedo room.
Not that I know anything about subs
Best regards,
SEAL
However, it may very well be that the missile exploded before leaving the tube. That would make sense.
[
It is extremely unlikely that a torpedo - especially one moving as fast as claimed - would circle around and hit the firing ship. The turning radius is just too large, and there's only so much fuel on board the torp.
It is much more likely that the warhead armed too early, and it detonated in the tube, or perhaps <i>Kusk</i> wound up downrange, and got shot by the tester - although a 200 knot torpedo would make a HELL of a lot of noise, so you'd think one of the Yank subs would have heard it if the latter was the case.
What strikes me as odd though is that I'm pretty sure <i>Kursk</i> is a boomer, that is, a strategic missle sub. It seems an odd choice to use a boomer to test a hunter/killer weapon.
The 200 knot torpedo is pretty impressive though. That's like 4 times faster than the current crop. I wonder how long the range is, and how fast it can turn, and how the guidence system (if any) works. Most modern torpedos are wire-guided, active-homing terminal. You steer it from the ship via commands down the wire until it picks up the target with its own active sonar, and then it homes in from there. Keeping a wire payed out without breaking at 200kts is quite the trick.
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In other unrelated news, several non-NATO supporting countries have have announced they will be disarming and dismantling their rust seeking torpedoes."
--CH - "Tailgate" (BB)
'Das noogoodnick 0,0 coordinates are targeting torpedo at 127.0.0.1 and causing a bluescreen.'
The guys are DEAD. Even if it was some giant Russian cock-up, I don't think it's all that funny.
How amusing were all the morbid NASA jokes when the Challenger blew up?
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A recent Popular Science had an article on supersonic torpedoes that utilized cavitation, and they acted essentially like a gun. The nature of cavitation weaponry means you have very little control surface in the water, as the torpedo is surrounded by an air pocket, except for at the nose. If cavitation torpedoes are going to do any turning I doubt it will be any faster than 1% per foot for quite some time.
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A torpedo is supposed to have a safety mechanism that prevents it from detonating after a 180 degree turn, preventing this sort of accident. If it's true that the Kursk was hit by it's own weapon, and that is an unsubstantiated theory, then it means a bad design or bad quality control. It is more likely that the torpedo exploded while still in the submarine, or just outside it. The 60's era US submarines had a design flaw where a torpedo would start running inside the sub (called a hot run) when some testing leads were hooked up incorrectly. The only way to stop it was to do an emergency 180 degree turn, which activated the torpedo's safety mechanism designed to keep the torpedo from going after the sub that fired it. It would be interesting to see if the Kursk make any radical changes in depth, direction, or speed just before the explosion.
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The Kursk disaster was almost certainly caused by a "hot run" in one of their torpedo tubes.
A torpedo fired from underwater must carry an oxidizer with the fuel, since it is hard to get the O2 out of H2O on the fly. This creates a potential hazard, and a "hot run" is what happens when the torpedo starts up before it is supposed to (i.e. in the tube or on the rack).
If this happened, it is possible (although unlikely if you believe the hype in the case of the MK 48's currently used on U.S. submarines) that a warhead could "cook off," causing an explosion. It is also possible that the torpedo in the tube could have itself exploded, causing a serious flooding casualty.
The men in the torpedo room would have perished instantly from high-speed water in the people compartment and the resultant pressure increase. Those that survived would have been behind an already closed watertight door, because a hull breach of the diameter of a torpedo tube or larger at operating depth for a nuclear sub would cause an increase in air pressure too rapid to permit casualty actions before rendering the crew incapable of them.
I speculate that there is an engine room watertight door on that class of ship, and no others forward of it. The people in engineering probably survived (accounting for the shut down reactor and lack of a radiological event), and that those are the people who were doing the tapping. If a Russian sub is anything like a U.S. sub, there would have been 8 and 20 people working in the engineering spaces. Everyone else would have been in the forward compartment at battle stations for the torpedo drill.
A lot of this is based on SOP for U.S. subs, but I have a feeling that the Russian procedures are fairly similar.
Wrong. Try again.
A 200 knot torpedo/missile (that's not even designed to make drastic course changes at all, much less 180 degrees) has a minuscule (read: impossible) chance of taking out its launch platform once launched.
Far more likely is the theory that K-141's standard torpedoes detonated in the exercise, probably while still in the tube or weapons racks.
The Bellona Foundation has posted their analysis here, and the venerable folks at Jane's have their's up as well.
Finally, the effect this will have on Naval funding and deployment was discussed at STRATFOR.
:wq
Saying that the explosion registered a 3 on the richter scale doesn't mean a whole to to me. Does anybody know a rough translation for this into some more common measure of explosive force (lbs of TNT perhaps)?
Richter scale 3 is equivalent to 29 tons of TNT going off. 3.5 is equivalent to 73 tons of TNT and 4.0 is around 1000 tons of TNT or a small nuclear device.
That is a truely sobering statistic.
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
This appears to be a problem ... according to the article, these missiles can only really travel in a straight line.
...
... shocking!
Perhaps the shock wave caused by the collapsing vacuum behind the torpedo ripped open the sub
... Anyone notice how this technology makes surface ships obsolete? One submarine equipped with these missiles could sink an entire fleet of warships in a few minutes, from miles away, and no one would even know who did it
You mean the "Mom" hatch? The little spot so that the seamen could take the moms on the tour and go "See Mom if the ship goes down I hide in that hatch and I can just swim to the surface." Knowing damn well they'll never make it.
-cpd
Actually, TOW (and similarly guided missiles, like Sagger) are actually fairly slow, in the 400MPH range. Of course, the 4km range and the ability to steer the missile make up for it somewhat. ;)
And TOW wires break *all the time*. The last TOW shoot I did had 2 wire breaks in 10 missiles.
I would imagine that keeping a wire alive in water, which is much more viscous than air, would be even tougher.
But it's moot anyway - further reading reveals that the Russian torps in question are unguided.
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Just hours after announcing GiS going on hiatus, we get another GiS story. Of course, its missing the inane audio track and rambling subject matter, so it doesn't live up to its predecessors :-)
ObOnTopic, a cavitation missile would have made a horrendous noise which could have been picked up by many nations underwater listening posts. The ruski press tends towards sensationalistic stories so outlandish it makes british tabloids seem resposible by comparison. But a cavitation missile which couldn't leave the tube for whatever techincal reason could have caused the first explosion, leading to the warhead or other explosives in the area getting set off.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
The Siberia level of Soldier of Fortune reminds me of this, too. Especially with the exploding helicopter and the noxious gas. The Russian space program has some blunders, too: They were the ones to achieve the first fatality in space. I think it was when a Cosmonaut was in Soyuz (maybe Vostok or Voskhod, I lost the October 86 issue of National Geographic, that's what had it). Then came the defective valve on a later Soyuz, which caused the three Cosmonauts onboard to suffocate prior to re-entry. Then there's the Mir blunder, when a Progress freighter was navigated by hand. The monitor went blank, until 400 milliseconds before it hit the station, puncturing one of the modules.
We only have to wait (probably not long) before the next blunder occurs. The only question remaining is who will be next.
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couple of points:
diving to these depths isn't that uncommon on tri-mix.
your decompression times do suck.
the divers can reach the sub in a relatively short amount of time.
biggest problem ?
you can't get into the sub while wearing your rig. you'd have to cut holes in the sub to get into it which would probably lead to problems for those people inside the sub.
some of the most glaring being the early nuclear-tipped (!) torpedo designs like the Mk 45.
The best nuclear weapon we ever developed, IMHO, was the Davy Crockett... Though I've a soft spot in my heart for the MADM..
Your Working Boy,
That Golf that we grabbed in the '70s was in the middle of the Pacific ocean, FAR from the red fleet's bases... AND they did NOT know where it sunk. We DID know, by virtue of having wired practiclly the entire Pacific seabed with sonar.
(contrary to what the other poster said, we *DID* get PART of the sub, most of it did disentegrate and go back down tho)
The Kursk, OTOH, sunk a hundred miles off of the russia's largest naval base. AND the ruskies know EXACTLY where it lies. The red fleet may not be what it used to be, but somehow, I doubt that Glomar Explorer could sneak up and grab the Kursk without being caught and sunk.
From a purely technical POV tho, grabbing that Oscar would be much easier tho. To grab the Golf, Glomar Explorer had to reach down approx. 17,500ft (MORE than three MILES (!!!)). The Kursk only lies in about 350ft. But, the Explorer's not gonna get anywhere NEAR the place.
john
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thats a negative......the personel hatches are very small on our subs and on the russians. you would be able to gain access through the missile hatches but you'd once again have to cut through the doors as they were not designed to be opened from the outside.
Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall down an open manhole cover and die.
The waters at that depth are VERY active. Divers wouldn't have enough equipment to stay under control. Its not like the depths of the titanic or the depths of that nature (300+ feet) in the smoother-flowing carribean. The waters at the bottom of that part of northern europe are horrendous; they couldn't get a rescue sub to hold still long enough to connect.
And if a sub couldn't hold still, don't expect a diver to be able to stand still in that...
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-- Joe
Some of the knowledge is public. Presumably a great deal of it is not. Details matter.
Plus, secrecy is even more of a habit with their military and government than it is with ours.
And what use is military might in this post-Cold War era?
No disrespect meant, but ... what?! Even just in terms of a military as only a defense, Russia has at least as much a need for one as any other country, and more than most. The "end of the Cold War" was by no stretch of the imagination the end of war, nor the end of military-based international posturing.
There's no need for a "new arms race" when the old one didn't end. Slowed down a little, maybe.