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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."
The reality is that they now travel very quiet. The collision is just an illustration of that.
Indeed, Sherry Sontag's Blind Man's Bluff tells a lot of interesting stories about Russian-American submarine escapades during the Cold War. Sometimes our Navies seemed less like proud defenders of the motherland and more like dumbass high school kids playing chicken.
http://informationdissemination.blogspot.com/2009/02/ballistic-missile-submarines-in-deep.html http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/
Both were ballistic missile submarines. For those, following other submarines at distances where crashes are a significant risk is not SOP.
What are the odds that two advanced SSBN submarines would collide in a vast ocean accidentally ?
FTFA:
"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."
So probably not quite as unlikely as one would have been more comfortable thinking :-)
sigs are hazardous to your health
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.
Jesus Christ. Please get your sarcasm detector fixed.
Fucking moron.
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.
Russians used to do what were called "Crazy Ivans."
Yes, we all saw The Hunt for Red October.
Conversely, only the British and their more recent ex-colonies drive on the left.
Ok, so I'm wrong, but that makes me a troll?
Christ, all moderators are total idiots.
^- that's a troll.
Comment of the year
Actually every maritime organisation in the world civilian and military uses nautical miles if they didn't it would be chaos on the high sees.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
The Register has a decent analysis of this making similar points:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/16/subs_crash/
Lewis Page consistently seems to write insightfully about nuclear submarines - I look forward to seeing how well he can rant about Wikipedia.
'This writing business. Pencils and what-not. Over-rated if you ask me. Silly stuff. Nothing in it' - Eeyore
Yeah cause then we'd have to read that shitty story that somebody is bound to post.
Here you go: http://www.snopes.com/military/lighthouse.asp
And for completeness' sake, here's the (amusing) video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-dwDhvHE_I
US Subs at least, (can't speak to UK and French sub technology) are supposed to already have a pretty advanced array of non-emitting sensors, including very sensitive gravimeters capable of detecting and mapping gravitational fields around the ship (as I understand it, primarily for detecting and navigating around earthen features, but probably capable of detecting other vessels at shorter ranges), and a number of electromagnetic sensors for detecting things like mines, which probably work just fine for detecting other large metal objects (like other subs), and probably a few things which aren't supposed to exist...
That said, I expect neither the French or UK submarine fleet is quite as matured as the US fleet, just because of the sheer amount of moola the US has dumped into submarines.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
Not the nukes, the MISSILES... the steam piping, I believe the line was "there are things in here which don't react well to bullets"
We have something similar in spanish while driving... "Derecho" (straight) and "Derecha" (right).
Comming to an intersection, it is difficult to tell if they are asking to turn right or just telling you to go ahead. (specially from "back seat drivers")
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Similar in French too - "droit" means right and "tout droit" (literally translated as all right) means straight on. However, it probably only appears strange to people like me who don't really speak the language.
It's obvious you know nothing about nautical subjects. The nautical mile was defined as 1,852 meters in 1929, and every navy in the world uses this definition. It is approximately one arc minute of length along any meridian. All international treaties dealing with distances on water use the same nautical mile definition.
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.
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.
An optical camera relies on light coming from or reflect off an object to see it. Light only travels a matter of a few metres underwater, and to hear another vessel (i.e. SONAR) that vessel needs to be emitting some sound; which these submarines are designed to minimise.
" To steal ideas from one person is plagiarism; to steal from many is research. "
IAS, and while we listen on passive it is possible for you not to hear another boat in the water. We have patrol areas and transit lanes set aside to avoid going bump in the night, but shit happens.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
I bet you can't put it in teaspoons per lightyear.
Some one will now rip my math into shreds of sobbing uselessness, probably around the newtons to meters/second part.
Actually, I might do it a little earlier.
238500 grams/hoghshead
238500/19.86=12009 grams of plutonium(call it 12 kilos)
First off, it should be 238500 cm^3/hogshead. Which happens to be 238500 grams of water, but that's fairly minor. The real killer is that you should then have multiplied by the density of plutonium, not divided by it. Simple sanity check - do you expect plutonium to float? If not then it shouldn't be lighter than water.
So it ends up with 238,500*19.86 = 4,736,610 grams of plutonium.
Thus you have ~95,000,000 tons of TNT per hogshead of plutonium.
Which comes around ~391,000,000Gj.
Which makes for a bit under 2,000,000,000,000kN when used to over 40 rods.
I'd work out the speed the sub would get up to, but I'm running late for work...
If two submarines crash in the ocean, and neither is running sonar, does it make a sound?
yes. it sounds like "crunch" followed by "oh, shit".
Then followed by "merde!"
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
I am a (US) Submariner and although I can't speak to what sensor technology we have I can say that at least US SSBNs would never be fitted with "mine avoidance" sensors unless they expected to be transiting through mine fields. Which is stupid. At least in the US fleet, SSNs get the cool technology, SSBNs then get the castoffs.
Get 4 hours of sleep, wake up, prewatch tour, eat, stand 6 hours of watch, try to fit all of your divisional and collateral responsibilities into 4-5 hours (and fail), attend training, work on qualifications, etc. for another couple of hours, and repeat the 18-hour cycle.
As an added bonus, the senior chain of command works on a 24-hour a day schedule instead of the normal 18-hour a day schedule, which means that the frequent morning and/or afternoon all-hands drills may occur during the time you're supposed to be sleeping. Oh well. :P
Basically we stand watch and train continuously, catching breaks when we can. I'm an officer, the routine is a bit different for enlisted crew (more cleaning and other assorted BS but then they don't have to attend EVERY SINGLE TRAINING SESSION known to man ;).
It's the limeys and the frogs trying to play "let's sneak up on 'em" the way the yanks and the russkies used to do.
There, has that got enough pejorative in it for ya?