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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.
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!!
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!
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.
Both were ballistic missile submarines. For those, following other submarines at distances where crashes are a significant risk is not SOP.
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.
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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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.
The dessert?
I find it hard to find an ice-cream dish with sufficient room for one nuclear missile submarine, let alone two.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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!
"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."
Visibility under the water is poor. Subs turn slowly. Most you'd get out of that is "Mind the sub." "What sub?" *splat*
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
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.
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
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.
Because light of just about any sort and whole swaths of the rest of the EM spectrum don't travel very far under water, and even if it did the hulls of the submarines are going to only be marginally higher temperature then the surrounding ocean.
I have a good thinking strategy that I go through before I open my mouth and say things like this. It basically figure that if I managed to think of this in only a few minutes there's probably a good chance that the many thousands of engineers from around the world over the past 30 years who are far more knowledgeable about this then me have also probably thought of it and have a good reason for not using it.
I may agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to face the consequences of saying it.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
Just a heads up...
If you are going to search for Supercavitation images on the web, make sure "safe search" is on...
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
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.
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.