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Nuclear Subs 'Collide In Ocean'
Jantastic noted a BBC report saying "A Royal Navy nuclear submarine was involved in a collision with a French nuclear sub in the middle of the Atlantic. It is understood HMS Vanguard and Le Triomphant were badly damaged in the crash earlier this month. Despite being equipped with sonar, it seems neither vessel spotted the other, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt said."
You'd think we would... you know... communicate with our allies? Maybe? At least they didn't almost collide with a lighthouse, though.
Posts not to be taken literally. Almost everything is sarcasm.
Is there a reason "collide in ocean" is in quotes? Could we also say they were "bumping their ballasts", "raising their periscopes", and so on?
forget the credit crunch. it's the collision crisis that will doom us all. I can already predict people bumping one another on the streets, cows going to waste on the fields, large buildings tripping the little ones... it's the apocalypse.
I was just robbed :( Of my future. The perps were a hip black guy, a weasly white guy that looked constipated, and a slightly creepy cougar type woman. They stole 700 billion from me.
Despite being equipped with sonar, it seems neither vessel spotted the other, the BBC's Caroline Wyatt said."
That's not surprising. All that stealthy sub technology doesn't work well when you're pinging with active SONAR. When subs don't want to be found, they go quiet and depend on their sensors to pick up noise from other vessels. Of course, if you have two subs each of whicf has stealth technology that is better than the other sub's sensors, then you have a situation where two subs can't see each other. Which could lead to a collision.
Run silent - Run deep.
When you think you are all alone out there in the big ocean then there is no need for sonar which would just gives your position away... just in case someone is out there.
When two play the game it can only lead to problems eventually... sort of like driving at night without headlights.
And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make
Maybe if they weren't in super stealth mode they would have seen each other and the accident could have been avoided. This technology is too dangerous and needs to be outlawed through international treaty. The up side is that we know that stealth works!!
Could one of them have been shadowing the other one... and suddenly one decided to make a quick random maneuver?
Chekov "where are your nukleer wessels??"
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ? There are rumors that US and Russian subs collided frequently during the cold wars because of the close proximity when they tracked each other and these incidents were usually silenced for political reasons. perhaps something else is going on ? One of the captains decided to be a smart ass ?
It's my understanding subs tend to listen for what's out there because using one's own sonar would broadcast your own position to the enemy. If both these subs were running in this way I can see how a collision would occur. It's happened before and is bound to happen again.
Otherwise we would not know that submarines have been equipped with Sonar (well, ASDIC at least) since the 1940s. Of course, they might have mentioned that boomers try to sneak around quietly without having Sonar disco parties. Still, no dolphins were murdered in the making of this accident!
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
That was the most retarded thing that could possibly have been added to that summary. You don't use active sonar unless you want to be found. Passive sonar won't find everything. It's entirely possible that both subs detected each other, both went silent, and both coasted right into one another. The FA is hilarious though:
No, Nick. It wouldn't be, because nuclear weapons have to be detonated. A lot of careful work goes into making sure they don't go off accidentally. If two subs crash hard enough to destroy them, there will be a lot of bubbles, and dead crewmen.
Well, (Colonel?) Angus, it's called physics. See, two objects with mass cannot occupy the same space...
No, a nuclear nightmare of the highest order is scores of terrorists running around with suitcase nukes. (you know, like the USA)
The collision of two submarines would actually be unlikely to release vast amounts of radiation, although it could scatter scores of nuclear warheads across the seabed. This is actually enormously unlikely since the weapons are stored in the most structurally secure portion of the vessel, in their own launch tubes. Most likely they would stay in the tubes in all but the most severe impact. Remember, submarines are not made out of porcelain. They are made out of various metals and in a collision (as opposed to an explosion) they would not likely separate into many pieces. Just think of the physics involved - when two cars collide head-on at over 50 mph they do not typically disintegrate. The total energy is vastly higher here, but the relative speed is much slower, and a lot of the energy involved will be absorbed by the water in the way that air doesn't.
I'm as put off by the fact of WWIII in a can being writ across our oceans many times over as the next guy, but I prefer to skip the bullshit rhetoric. I guess that's why I'm not a politician.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2009/02/ballistic-missile-submarines-in-deep.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/
FTFA
"The Ministry of Defence needs to explain how it is possible for a submarine carrying weapons of mass destruction to collide with another submarine carrying weapons of mass destruction in the middle of the world's second-largest ocean," he said.
See the statement above...
Nuclear engineer John Large (braggart) told the BBC that navies often used the same "nesting grounds".
"Both navies want quiet areas, deep areas, roughly the same distance from their home ports. So you find these station grounds have got quite a few submarines, not only French and Royal Navy but also from Russia and the United States."
It doesn't matter if the parking lot is large, but if the situation is as if Sony is giving away flatscreen televisions, maybe the respective Defense Departments need to find other parking lots.
Ya think?
Well, this was bound to happen. I hear things are getting pretty cramped down there in the ocean.
This guy's the limit!
The french didn't surrender !
A head on collision was bound to happen even if they knew the other sub was there. The French drive on the right, the British on the left.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
My money's on conficker. That's what you get, when you run windows on your nuclear submarines!
Aren't the French and British navy both using MS Windows now..? Just noticing some recent trouble with the French Air-force related to this... Perhaps they mistook the "sonar screensaver" for the real thing..?
Just one ping!
We brake for nobody.
If you can't triforce and you havent been butthurt by boxxybabee visit /b/ today and say Raul654 from Wikipedia sent you! /b/
Crazy Jean or Jon?
Depending on who was doing the actual maneuvering?
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The bit I find hilarious about every showing of this story that I've seen on the net, is that everyone says "How can this have happened?"
Do *you* want to tell the French where all our nuclear subs are at any moment in time?
Do the French want to tell us where all their nuclear subs are at any moment in time?
Do *you* want to be in a country where all our nuclear subs light up the sonar of any passing ship like a Christmas tree?
No. Therefore, it's an INCREDIBLE show of the power of the anti-detection capabilities of these subs that they BOTH manouvered close enough to each other to collide without EITHER of them detecting the other. That's bloody fantastic. A technology used by the military that actually works in production and has an incredibly relevant use.
As to what happens in a collision... if ANY country in the world truly has nuclear weapons that can be set off without being ARMED first, then we have a bigger problem than what happens if two tiny ships in a vast, three-dimensional ocean might happen to accidentally collide. These things NEED to withstand just about anything, or else the enemy just fires one shot in the right place and "Blam!"... nuclear detonation without ever having owned a nuclear weapon.
Similarly for the onboard reactor. Nuclear subs are not fragile, and their designers not stupid (as has been proved by the anti-sonar technology!)... if a sub is really that easy to sink / destroy and leak radiation enough to matter, then they become nothing more than timebombs. When they next dock for repairs etc. (which cannot really be hidden from satellites, etc.), just blow them up and you've set off a nuclear warhead / contaminated the seas inside your enemies own country.
Ships are supposed to pass in the night!
They must be pretty silent though... Red October eat your heart out.?
sudo mount --milk --sugar
From a technological standpoint, I find it rather amusing that the anti-sonar systems on both subs, according to the article, worked "a little too well." Well, duh -- they did as their engineers designed them to do.
Except, one thing puzzles me -- if your Sonar is switched on, the other sub should pick that up. So the sonar systems of both subs must've been running quiet. So the anti-sonar systems have nothing to do with the collision. So why does the article mentions them? Did I miss something?
Must be the reporters. They can never seem to get the story right; nor do they seem able to catch the obvious flaws in what they report.
In short: they're just as incompetent as the Big Boys...
Gee, I feel so much safer now...
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
So, we've had a US vs. Russian sat, now a UK vs. French ICBM sub, what are the next cold war icons scheduled to collide?
USS Agusta vs. Russian nuclear submarine: It's true, trust me
Big 8 military always play little war games with each other; sometimes there are accidents. There is absolutely NO reason to think the British and French don't play war games. If the USA and USSR couldn't get sonar navigation good enough for playing chicken, there is no reason to think the British and French would.
Meh, shit happens....
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The dessert? In the air? Perhaps in outer space...
Should have just read "Two submarines collide"...anyone with half a brain could deduce that the collision occurred in the water. :P
Somebody played Ivan the Mad once too many.
> The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament described the
> collision as "a nuclear nightmare of the highest order".
The problem with this sort of overblown rhetoric is that it uses up the effect of these words. Had both submarines detonated all their warheads, that would have been "a nuclear nightmare of the highest order". This incident is just part of having a Navy. As Grace Hopper said, "A ship in port is safe, but that's not what ships are built for".
The Army reading list
Why the darn subs don't have at lease one IR camera in front ? Come-on people. Even Nemo's sub had portholes.
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Nuclear submarines colliding, satellites colliding, 200 million Chinese suddenly move inland leaving cities, US government giving away billions of dollars to banks...
Don't know about you, but lately I feel more and more like I am living in a James Bond movie.
Only I am not the one with cool gadgets, drinking problem and a girl with a sexual innuendo for a name under each arm.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Clearly these subs were tracking the 2 satellites that collided last week http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/11/2318226. The six day delay can be explained by the difference in speed of a nuclear sub compared to a satellite.
"No. Therefore, it's an INCREDIBLE show of the power of the anti-detection capabilities of these subs that they BOTH manouvered close enough to each other to collide without EITHER of them detecting the other. That's bloody fantastic. A technology used by the military that actually works in production and has an incredibly relevant use."
More likely, this points out that British and French subs have inadequate DETECTION capabilities. Couldn't find each other to the point of a collision.
Not knowing there's something out there a mile away I can understand, that's the state of the art. But a hundred meters away gets more intriguing. That's probably the minimum distance for evading a collision, and assumes the captains don't both make the wrong move. They ought to have heard something at that distance.
I suspect the damage radius of modern torpedoes is in excess of a hundred meters, especially if the torps are nuclear, but they sure don't need to be. This incident seems to me to point out that these boats didn't know each other were out there, more because they couldn't detect the other, and most likely because they aren't that good at finding other boats.
I wonder if an L.A. class boat in the area, watching the action... hehe...
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Looks like we'll have to alter the age-old saying "passed like ships in the night" to include "... except French and British nuclear submarines".
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Yeah, this makes absolutely bugger-all sense. The American/Russian collisions during the Cold War were subs deliberately playing cat and mouse. The Russians were typically noisier than the Americans and the skippers on those boats knew they could have a tail and not know it. The "Crazy Ivan" maneuver was a rapid turning of a boat to so they could hear past the prop wash of their boat. Of course, this is like slamming on the brakes when being tailgated.
So it makes sense that attack subs could get in scrapes like this but ballistic missiles subs deliberately seek out the most isolated patches of water imaginable and avoid any contact that comes near. It really does stretch credulity to imagine that there could be a one-in-a-million collision between two such vessels.
Usually there's a good reason for collisions in what one would otherwise imagine to be vast, open stretches. In space, in the air, on the water, there's reasons. It usually comes down to traffic funneled into a confined area for necessary, understandable reasons. Airports by their very nature require large numbers of aircraft to operate in close proximity. I would be surprised to hear of a mid-air collision over the Atlantic but not in the least to hear of one above a major airport. Ocean travel is constrained by geography and economics and there are certain lanes that are the most economical to travel, thus increasing the odds of multiple ships being in the area. But like airports, harbors represent the greatest concentration of ships and thus the greatest danger of collision. In space there may seem to be a whole lot of, well, space, but the useful orbits are actually more constricted than one might imagine. Therefore it becomes less a matter of astronomical impossibility and more a matter of statistical inevitability.
I suppose that this very well could be a case of very, very, very long odds, two boomers bumping into each other in the middle of nowhere but it remains suspiciously odd.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
I'd assume that both of the subs were using passive sonar, probably towed-arrays. You typically don't go active unless you're already in a shooting fight and need the best possible firing solution against a threat that's running silent. I don't know if Boomers have passive sonar as good as that of an attack submarine, but it's probably pretty close. All this incident proves is that the engineers did their jobs well and made the sub nearly undetectable by passive means.
>if your Sonar is switched on, the other sub should pick that up.
Not necessarily. Some sonar is passive - my company (well, the company I work for...) designs hull and towed-array sonar which basically just listens to the noise in the water. Pinging helps find things, but the idea is if you just hang a bunch of hydrophones out your tail end, you can pick up other subs, especially as they get close.
For when playing "chicken" in cars gets to be boring.
http://transformativeworks.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kd0YSGvcw2I&NR=1
How are those new stealth mods working out for you? Sincerely Your Military Industrial Complex Contractor
"Now go away or I shall bump you a second time!"
This is not likely. I have served in the Navy and am familiar a lot of how this stuff works and happens and ultimately, I believe this came down to a game of chicken where neither wanted to change course. Why they didn't want to? Who knows exactly, but acknowledging that you know that someone else is there reveals a lot about yourself that you wouldn't otherwise want them to know....such as that you have the capability to know where they are which is a useful secret in war-time. After all, if they don't know they can be seen, they will think they are invisible.
Many people in the UK believe that Trident is an expensively useless deterrent. Sarkozy said Brown had no idea how to fix the economic crisis. Soon after, there is a submarine collision. Brown was trying to upset Sarkozy while pandering to the right-wing UK tabloids and justifying the cost by using Trident to take on the French. Unfortunately, budget cuts mean that Trident subs are now crewed by mothers of private school kids whose only driving experience is using their Range-Rovers and Grand Cherokees to push poor people off the pavement. There could only be one outcome.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
If they're going to sail backwards all the time, they should have put a mirror.
Ya need to read your Tom Clancy. The article is wrong to talk about using SONAR. The thing in submarines is to NOT use your SONAR because it gives away your position. In World War II, the allies had no problem pinging for u-boats while submerged, but, for a submarine to ping something else is entirely a different matter. As soon as you ping, the enemy knows where you are.
So, just about all submarine driving these days is done through passive listening. You listen to the ocean to hear stuff that might be in your way. To navigate under the water, there are extensive charts of the ocean bottom coupled with inertial navigation. There's actually one US sub that rammed something underwater and was quite severely damaged, and a sailor was killed - it was going at least 30knots.
To evade detection then, submarines then must be very quiet and its that quiet that jacks up their enormous cost, even more. They have special materials in their hulls, special machinery that either runs more quietly or deadens sound, and even the propeller is shaped just so to avoid making noise as it propels the sub through the water. Remember, a few years ago, when Google's satellite view showed a US Submarine in drydock with its propeller fully visible? That was a huge, huge deal. Some say that the noise level of a Seawolf submarine is actually lower than the ambient noise of the ocean - rendering it essentially undetectable by passive listening. It's pretty reasonable to think that although older, the French and British submarines can run pretty quiet.
So, the situation is this, you have two submarines moving through the water, running quiet, and are almost indetectable, but not using any means other than listening and inertial navigation to move, and they hit each other, perhaps while engaged in some friendly war games. It's bound to happen. No two ways about it. The thing is, because they were running quiet, by definition, they weren't moving very fast, lessening the damage from collision.
This is my sig.
"This is a lighthouse. Your call."
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
so secret they didn't see each other coming... submarine black box recorded: pvt- captain, what does this creepy "beep beep" means? cpt- it's the oven pvt- ...mmh... and this blinking point?
cpt- it's.. errrm... the cooking point
AndrÃ
nop, nop, nop #VBLANK
Over who could date the cute Russian sub!
if their ballasts don't touch.
Except, one thing puzzles me -- if your Sonar is switched on, the other sub should pick that up. So the sonar systems of both subs must've been running quiet. So the anti-sonar systems have nothing to do with the collision. So why does the article mentions them? Did I miss something?
Yes you did :) You can't detect passive sonar.
...a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore ~H2G2
And yes, the engineers did their stuff well.
So if we were to ever have a "Dr. Strangelove" incident with these subs, they'd be even more difficult to spot than that plane was in the film.
But I am sure I can have full trust and confidence in the nuclear-wielding powers of the world that "OPE" could never happen. As much as I can trust that the US story about live nukes being flown unauthorized over its own land was false.
I have no problem with the technology. It's the people behind the technology I have a problem with. Can't the Royal Navy, the French, and the US, and the Russians (should I throw in China as well)? all agree to conduct their silly little war games in separate waters?
Yeah, I know -- I expect too much.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
I believe they collided almost head on so unless that manoeuvre was a handbrake turn I doubt they were shadowing one another (submarines not being well known for their manoeuvrability). I suspect that it's more likely a case of wrong place at the wrong time combined with good stealth technology). Actually, this does say a bit about how good the stealth technology must be since they weren't able to passively detect one another.
While it says something about how good their stealth technology is, it also says something about how much more work needs to be done on passive detection systems. What I mean by passive detection systems is anything like an optical camera which does not need to emit anything to see something. I am not sure what technologies could be used, but while hiding is a good thing, being able to 'see' is just as important.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
[...] I don't know if Boomers have passive sonar as good as that of an attack submarine, but it's probably pretty close. All this incident proves is that the engineers did their jobs well and made the sub nearly undetectable by passive means.
Even if they had the same Sonar suite / processing power, the end result would be that, all else being equal, the Boomer (missile sub) would have a better detection range than the attack sub, simply because the reactor would be optimized for noise, not speed.
the attack sub has need for speed transients (peak speeds inthe 35+ knots range), the boomer has not. Since detection by Active Sonar suites (Surface combatants and such, active sonobuoys etc) is an issue, the attack sub is preferably as small as possible, which denies it installing bulky noise reduction equipment, like a larger reactor cooling system which avoids the need for pumps.
As for spreading the boomers out, as elsewhere in history, geography dictates to history: even if the range is in the 4.000 nautical miles range, the areas that cover for example Iran and most of russia at the same time is not infinite, so depending on the strategic contingency planning (north Korea anyone?), the ocean can get smaller than it looks from space.
"If a boss demands loyalty, give him integrity. But if he demands integrity, give him loyalty." (John Boyd, 1927-1997)
>if your Sonar is switched on, the other sub should pick that up.
Not necessarily. Some sonar is passive - my company (well, the company I work for...) designs hull and towed-array sonar which basically just listens to the noise in the water. Pinging helps find things, but the idea is if you just hang a bunch of hydrophones out your tail end, you can pick up other subs, especially as they get close.
Ok, yeah, another bloke explained this. I've been out of touch with this line of technology for too long.
But couldn't you also detect changes in the electric field in the water as well? Fish do this all the time. And I would imagine it would be tough to completely mask the electrical signature of something as large as a sub. Even if the hull was completely non-conductive.
Let me guess. You can do this too, but it's top secret. You'd have to shoot all of us if you talked about it. :-)
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
Maybe Dale Earnhardt Jr. was driving the boat. Everyone see's that he doesn't know how to drive!
Maybe the sailor failed to acknowledge the UAC on time? "Windows need your permission to steer away from the current course"
Or maybe a genuine advantage check popped up in the middle of the evasion manouvre?
During the Cold War, France was giving up all sorts of NATO and esp American secrets to USSR. It is why they were dropped from the Military side of NATO (no, France did not quit it; they were forced out) in the 60s. I doubt that they would do it today, but you still have wildly differing attitudes about security. Certain EU countries really do not care if info about UK or USA make it over to China, Al Qaeda, North Korea, etc. , thought they get upset when we do the same thing to do them (for a tit for tat). Even now, about the only fully cooperating countries out there are US and UK, and then we both cooperate MOSTLY with Australia, Canada, and Israel. Then NATO comes after that.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Here's my question: aircraft fly at different flight levels, depending on the direction they're travelling, to avoid just this sort of problem. Is there a reason we can't have UK, French, US and Russian depth-levels? We should hopefully be able to keep our own submarines apart, even if we don't want to share this information with other countries.
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ?
According to the article it was probably because they use the same location. While the ocean might be huge there is a certain percentage that is is in international waters and a certain percentage of that area that appeals to the sort of training manoeuvres they make. Another factor to add in is that both these submarines are probably playing in waters that are of relatively similar distance from their home bases.
The odds are great until you start taking into account all the factors at play.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Was this really necessary to add? Were they thinking there would be people that wouldn't realize that subs only move in the water?
Next headline:
Cars collide... 'On land'!
Glad to see you were paying attention there. You forgot that Nukes "don't react well to bullets".
Please help metamoderate.
Considering that both countries Military forces, have been bitten recently by Windows Malware, you HAVE to wonder if their navigational computers are running Mickey$oft O/S! ;^) And if so WHY???
Of course, neither country would admit that M$ O/S / Software was involved or to making such a stupid decision as to ever let M$ on to ANY Military vessel in the first place!
I should send a Debian Lenny DVD to both Navys! ;^)
If I wanted to go fishing for a nuclear sub (or simply increase the likelihood of a collision), all I would need to do is find where they like to hang out (where are the most detailed maps of the ocean floor?) and drop some interesting bait (say a steel drum with alarm clocks inside).
That was the most retarded thing that could possibly have been added to that summary.
No, it wasn't. It's perfectly valid to ask why two subs with competent sonar operators did not detect any noises from the other ship at such close range.
No, Nick. It wouldn't be, because nuclear weapons have to be detonated.
He was referring, most likely, to the nuclear POWER PLANT, moron.
Or, perhaps, to the fact that people who managed to ram each other are the same morons who are holding a huge number of the country's nuclear missiles.
Please help metamoderate.
$ ping sub
Pinging sub with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from sub: bytes=32 time=30ms TTL=128
Reply from sub: bytes=32 time=20ms TTL=128
Reply from sub: bytes=32 time=10ms TTL=128
Reply from sub: bytes=32 time=0ms TTL=128
Ping statistics for sub:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 4, Lost = 0 (0% loss),
Approximate round trip times in milli-seconds:
Minimum = 0ms, Maximum = 30ms, Average = 15ms
Seriously, it's time to stop funding the military industrial complex to feed the elaborate appetites for enslaving the masses to fraudulent international bankers. I damn all governments to irrelevance. Support peace through anarchy.
-Joe Baker
Reading this thread, it is really amazing how much Tom Clancy has contributed to the slashdot knowledge base. I wonder how much of it is true or pertinent to the incident at hand.
I'd like to respectfully correct a very common and understandable error in your terminology. I think you mean "topography" when you talk about the peaks and troughs of the ocean floor. "Topology" is a mathematical term describing the connectivity of sets of points: for example the surface of s sphere has one kind of topology while the surface of a donut has a different kind, because continuous transformations that don't break the 2D surface of a sphere can't morph it into a shape with a hole in it. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology for more if you're interested.
That aside, your point is well-taken that subs might tend to congregate in the same areas due to favorable underwater geological features.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
To be so stealthy that you cant be detected, even up to the point of contact?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I've never read more rank speculation - and here is some more!
Clearly we must coordinate operations with our allies. Just as clearly, however, the only reason for the ballistic missile fleets to be at sea is for them to be carrying out the same mission they have always had - serving as a deterrent. Similarly, any land-based ICBMs the nuclear powers still have on hand from when Ronald Reagan single handedly tore down the Berlin Wall, well, they are still directly or indirectly threatening other countries. Presumably most are still targeted, fueled and ready to go.
For any strategic missile sub to carry out its mission, it must travel quiet. Further, it must travel in a completely unpredictable pattern. One presumes that the Captain's orders rarely consist of specific cruising instructions. These subs are supposed to be hard to find and hard to predict once you do have a point to plot on your own chart (for instance, when the sub sailed in the first place).
The real risk here is not that there may be well-known friendly bits of ocean. The real risk is that a sub's captain would choose to make use of such on a regular basis.
I heard the front fell off!
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
Saved the asses of the UK in the war against Argentina.
Francois Mitterand convinced the company that produced the Exocet missiles to give access to the UK to the designs of these weapons.
Argentina had these missiles and were using them successfully against British ships.
And France is there in Afghanistan, fighting a fight which many other countries are reluctant to fight...
And this is just for starters. The Brits have ground to be ambivalent about France, but the US?
Check the history about the US war of independence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your war of independence for example ?
WWI?
WWII?
First Gulf War?
Afghanistan invasion?
Should I carry on?
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Someone should have spent more time Naval Gazing.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
One Ping Only dammit
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
England and France? I bet they had each other on /ignore.
France is in Afghanistan not soley because of NATO commitments. AQ is a full threat to the west. They continue to attack there and are certainly trying to attack America even now. Sadly, had we had real leadership in 2000, AQ would be but a memory. As it is, the west is likely going to lose Afghanistan to AQ, just like Pakistan is slowly being taken over by Talibahn/AQ. And this was because of a total idiot.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Blind Chicken
They were both engaged in emergency maneuvers to avoid upsetting a laser-equipped shark.
Have gnu, will travel.
Or perhaps Crazy Pierre?
But seriously, are there really still holes in a submarine's passive sonar any more?
was one trying to get the drop on the other, playing submarine-style stealth tag? maybe a sub commander trying to see how well he can track another sub without being detected, and the other doing a random "Crazy Ivan" style maneuver? i believe such things have happened before.
I find it very interesting that each sub was able to find the exact "middle of the Atlantic".
jp
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The truth? Both got some suprise buttsex from a passing whale and are embarresed to admit it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Off to watch Yes, (Prime) Minister.. Thanks for the reference!
"[Le Triomphant's] sonar dome was damaged [in the collision]"
you don't need 'scare quotes' to convey that.
My guess is, it was a joint manoeuvre to test their stealth capabilities. It was a huge success. Now what they have to work on is their stealth technology wrt the general public.
but of course I'm french, why do you think we have this outrageous accident ?
"Oops, sorry!"
- Dan
Oops, we accidentally severed the Middle Eastern internet cables...
First post! (just in case I am...)
Supercavitation... that is all.
Stop! Dremel time!
What's big and long and full of seamen?
A submarine!
Thank you thank you! I'm here all week!
Disclaimer: The opinions and actions of the US Gov't are in no way representative of those held by this author or its ci
Modern submarines don't have "baffles" - they have a towed array which is actually more sensitive than the main sonar array. If there is a direction along which the detection capabilities of a submarine are the worst, it's in the front.
It was a misunderstanding/malentendu. The Brit sub driver drove on left side. Who knows?
Just put one in the front and one in the back. Station a non-sleeper at each with a com-link, problem solved.
If everyone does it the the ones on the sides are not needed.
let me know when 3 of them hit each other at the same time
I would also recommend Hostile Waters by Peter Huchthausen. It's a fascinating story both in the events themselves, and in how it was handled by both countries.
Hot Damn! It's the Soggy Bottom Boys!
When you're underwater a BSOD just looks like another porthole.
Military submarines know their position largely by calculating distance, speed, direction and time taken, they also take into account expected currents and this data is all considered against charts of course. Without active sonar, gps, but with only compass orientation this is the only way to navigate thousands of feet down. Naturally over a period of silent running a submarine will become less and less certain about it's position. This doesn't really matter too much in the massive expanse of ocean, only occasionally surfacing to get a fix from a satellite.
Add to that that submarines don't exactly report to each other where they are.
The odds of a submarine hitting anything in the oceans is extremely remote. It's very very hard to fit your head around the cubic volume of the oceans, even when you have a submarine limited to only the top 1000-3000ft of it!
This is the very definition of a freak occurance.
Infact so unusual and unlikely that I'm quite certain these two submarines were somewhat aware of the presence of the other, were likely following and playing a bit of cat and mouse perhaps (really what else is there to do down there?). But both running silent and lacking any positive fix, there would always be the chance of a collision. No surprises they collided at slow speed - this would be right if they were in maximum stealth.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
About 25 years ago I took a seminar in submarine design. This was still during the cold war. In the silencing discussion the instructor noted that by the mid 1990's, the technology, while expensive, would be available to make submarines so silent that, as he put it, "the first you'd know that another submarine is out there is when their collision alarm sounded." This is within a couple of hundred yards or even less. Ballistic missile submarines are the one class of submarine where a country wants to invest that kind of money. So it's not too surprising that, if they were near each other, neither submarine crew knew the other sub was there until it was too late to avoid a collision.
Windows crashed the UK sub's computers, during a manouver and...
This scenario between two 0 degree angle-on-the-bow (head-on) ballistic missile submarines is entirely possible without any speculation about "crazy ivans" or SSN-type games. Try looking up the U.S.S. San Francisco accident. Even though the San Fran was going at high speed it couldn't hear the seamount in front of it because it does not make enough noise above the background noise of the ocean. Ballistic missile submarines make a huge effort not to make any noise. Modern submarines usually don't make noise above the level of the background noise of the ocean. Boomers on missile patrol are even quieter. Two boomers at slow speed could easily run into each other before they could be detected on passive sonar. The U.S. doesn't tell our allies where we patrol, heck, we don't even tell our surface fleet or fast-attack submarines where we're patrolling. I'm just glad that no one was hurt and the billion-dollar boats were just a bit dented.
Former Sonar Tech on a Trident
Interesting, now it's clear as mud, the French sub got bumped in a soft spot on the nose and got crinkled, the Brit's bumped on a hard spot with no real damage until the French sub's towed array kept coming due to inertia and fouled the Brit's prop. These propellers are super precise and the least damage would destroy the shafts and bearings balance causing probably millions of Euros in damage. I bet everybody and their brother's are going to search the bottom for fallen goodies so they can figure out what the French can and can't hear out there.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Read all of Clancy's books - and saw the movies.
My father worked in the pentagon and attended the Naval Academy. He could not deny that Clancy got way too much correct.
"The article mentions that they happen to frequent the same sea lanes, but even still that seems a tad improbable."
If there are areas of the ocean which are better for hiding than others, the probability of two missile boats both choosing the same area in which to hide would be higher. It's still pretty unlikely that two would bump, but it may not be not quite so unlikely as it first would appear.
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
I am not a specialist about military matters. However, this sounds like a load of bullshit.
Wikipedia claims that France (founding nato member) left because the French went for military independence. After becoming a nuclear power in 1960, France saw themselves not adequately represented in the NATO.
So, it looks less like "the French leaking secrets" and more like "the Americans not being able to share power".
Being Swiss and neutral, guess which version sound more credible to me...
*CLANG!*
What the fuck was that?
underwater chicken with nuclear subs..
after all was said and done, the royal and french navy's had to make sure their stories corroborated eachother.
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
you're a bigger fool than they thought you were. Have you ever wondered about the chances that two such vessels could be so close to each other by chance?
And countered it.
Type 206 u-boats have non-magnetic steel hulls. Pretty bad-ass, huh?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_206_submarine
And of course the old Russian Alfa hulls, made from titanium, were non-magnetic, and the USS Virginia class is said to have an "electromagnetic detection reduction system", which I would guess is probably a non-magnetic hull.
This is my sig.
Perhaps they have codes for areas, where the communication officers have no idea what areas the codes correspond to, but can nevertheless compare codes with their allies officers to make sure two subs never get to be in the same area at the same time.
Or something...
Anyhow, someone or some system obviously failed. I don't think that they just neglected the odds. Speaking of movies this exact thing almost happened in "Das Boot". =)
Accidents happen, but not in deciding what's news when national security is at stake.
Funny how this happens the same day as North Korea threatens nuclear tests (again). Would there be a more subtle, less threatening way to make a headline that reminds the world that two countries are nuclear and active?
You don't need sonar. You need VLW radio receivers on the subs, and you need transmitter stations to send the date, which the French don't have, but that the British do: http://www.economicexpert.com/a/Longwave.htm. They already use this technology to transmit information updtates to subs, even when they are running dark.
For detection, you just need overflights by satellites or aircraft equipped with SAR (Synthetic Aperture Radar): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_aperture_radar. The Soviets used a satellite based system for submarine detection since the 1980s http://www.heritage.org/research/nationalsecurity/bg466.cfm, and most western governments followed suit. Even the Canadians have flown SAR satellite constellations. The submarines, if they move, show up as surface lumps, and if don't mode, then your position is known (approximately) from where the lump last was.
So it's likely that at least a number of countries knew where both subs were, and at least the Brits could have sent a message to their sub indicating an impending close call -- which for this type of submarine, given that they don't play cat and mouse games with it, probably counts in nautical miles.
-- Terry
What I mean by passive detection systems is anything like an optical camera which does not need to emit anything to see something. I am not sure what technologies could be used
Good idea.
http://extreme.ucsd.edu/Research/AcousticDaylight/AcousticDaylight.html
...a revolutionary underwater electronic imaging technique currently under development by a dozen Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO) scientists is promising to shed new light into the ocean's murkiest depths.
The technique, known as the Acoustic Daylight Ocean Noise Imaging System (ADONIS), uses the ambient noise present in the ocean- created by everything from passing ships, breaking waves and popping of bubbles- to create images of objects in the water.
Google "Acoustic Daylight" for more.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
I don't mean like the cool lesbian clit-bumping tribulation kind of gay, but the awkward frotting and potential of one making a "hoody" on the other frotter kind of gay.
*jeepers*creepers*
Been there, done that. When you are in your patrol area typically you are making turns for 3 knots or less. If you get a contact you try to avoid it without either leaving your patrol area or being detected yourself.
Occasionally your are either unable to estimate the range to a contact due to a technical reason or sonar just blows the estimate. That's what happened to us. We had him on sonar: a weak sound level with a zero bearing rate -- sonar told us he was far away.
Our collision was with a Russian boat. We had just started to clear baffles to port when he hit us on the starboard side just forward of the sail. He took out all the forward ballast tanks on the starboard side. If we hadn't just started to clear baffles to port he would have T-boned us and it would have been a lot uglier for us.
He had no clue that we were there -- he thought he had hit the bottom (immediately he lit off his fathometer on the short scale) --- the water was 6,000 feet deep. His reactor plant scrammed, he started flooding and had to surface. We just went deep and snuck away.
I know the U.S. boats and systems are much tougher than many think and I am certain the British and French boats are comparable.
Why did they go into the Atlantic in the first place? To hunt Somalian pirates? To frighten poor Ukrainian and Russian peasants? To fight spam and phishing problems, which are overwhelming the civilization? What do the want to solve with the nuclear ballistic rockets??
At least it could be one submarine there. But why they swarming in the ocean to the point of collisions? In this economic situation I would not think it is a good way of spending our money.
... promptly surrendered.
ummm but, i'd like to know WHERE they were operating. I'm thinking that they might have been using certain unnamed currents in undisclosed trenches to gain access to other operating areas. Not as if we're talking Deep Space 9 wormholes and other sci-fi shows' jump gates and such. It's possible (of course i cannot prove it) that some submarine topography (for you who are NOT bubbleheads and don't know there is more than one meaning to "submarine"....) allows submarines to just drift dead silent. As long as there are markers (beacons) or landmarks that can be passively triangulated on, then the CO knows when to spin up the thruster/s to break out of the current and therefore "disappear".
The GIUK "choke point" is an area where for decades the USN got to enjoy using its SOSUS network and unnamed and some unacknowledged upgrades to see any and everything that went through. Soviet AGIs (intelligence craft outfitted to look like trawlers/fishing boats) sometimes followed my former ship (USS Flint (AE-32), and i'm talking about 1986; our captain even came over the 1MC and talked about the AGI that was shadowing us, and i shot 2 (low-quality) pics myself) out of the area off SF because they thought we were helping boomers from Bremerton in the area standing by or fast attacks from overhaul at Mare Island to slip out into the deep sea. After all, an AE-26 class ammo ship is some 560 feet long, 82 or so wide, and about 24+ deep, and we could back then (if it were requred) somewhat mask a boomer with our noisy steam plant. But, even back then the USN subs were super quiet, but not nearly as quiet (if i read correct) as Akula or some other titanium hulls the Soviets built at great expense and outfitted with Toshiba/someother Japanese technology-based propeller milling machines that helped Soviet boats just "disappear" when the USN had enjoyed detection superiority over the "enemy".
Anyway, getting back to my earlier point, it's possible these two boats were unfortunately transiting a passage at the same time, and once they detected minute mechanical sounds realized that avoiding collision was more important then posturing for destroying another ship, given the current (from their perspective) DEFCON-equivalent situation. They might have even known exactly whose boat was outside just prior to the collision, since hull scraping might mask or make difficult for several seconds to minutes what hull they hit.
Sonar detection (i'm not talking just about the active pinging type, but also the conformal arrays, trailed wire/towed array systems, and the friendly buoys that might relay (broadcast, not directional transmission) intel) and intelligence gathering over the past 20+ years (aided by espionage by all parties) has enabled various navies to know not ONLY nation and class of boat, but the EXACT boat-- so long as it was previously detected and had no post-detection overhauls that would alter the signature... things such as modifying pipes or pumps or condensers and turbo generator sets, or even the "rafts" on which whole decks sat on(keep in mind that the hull at depth are under ENORMOUS pressure pers square inch and the hull therefore compresses, meaning it's not advantageous ot have decks directly welded to the tube but rather to the bulkheads-mounted shock and noise attenuating sound mounts...) which would either change acoustics, magnetic properties or other things.
But, if they were transiting almost in parallel, they might have had a shallow angle collision. I wouldn't imagine them head on in the same stream if the purpose was to be drifting. Even if the media report a head on collision, we have no reason to accept that as truth unless we had experts we trusted visit each hull, look at the navigation logs, and interpolate the evidence, which by now will be marked/classified secret or higher, or which will have been "sanitized for public consumption".
(Captch: "cremate")
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Where is Bungo Pete when you need him?
I can't help thinking that this story is related.
"Microsoft Windows is now powering the British Royal Navy's nuclear-armed submarine fleet; giving all new meaning to the Blue Screen of Death."...
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Submarines-Windows-Royal-Navy,6718.html
"Microsoft...bringing whole new meaning to the terms 'crashing your computer' and 'blue screen of death' "
20 amps w/ the arrow pointing straight up.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
"Trout droit" Which translates to "fish on" I think..
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I also find it interesting that the story was nowhere on the French "Le Monde" newspaper website and the official story of the French sub hitting a container buried somewhere. Then the BBC released it and the French military admitted to it and it received very limited coverage in the French press.
Speed varies with the square root of energy, so a factor of 400 in the energy calculation corresponds to a factor of 20 in speed. There may also be a sqrt{2} error: the kinetic energy of a kilogram moving at 1m/s is only half a Joule.
Maybe they shouldn't be running Windows :P