HMS Astute

You may have heard about the shooting death on board the British submarine HMS Astute recently. I heard about it and decided to see just what kind of submarine it was. It's a relatively new sub. I found a bunch of pictures including some of it under construction and prior to launch.

HMS Astute

In the third photo you can see the openings in the pressure hull for the torpedoes. Interestingly, this sub does not have separate inner and outer hulls. It weighs (displaces) a thousand tons more when submerged when surfaced. A cubic foot of seawater weighs about 64 pounds, (1.02500 (g / ml) = 63.9886596 pounds per (cubic foot)) so a ton of water occupies about 30 cubic feet. A thousand tons of water will occupy 30,000 cubic feet. The submarine displaces around 7,000 tons, or something over 200,000 cubic feet. What I am wondering is whether the tanks used to submerge the submarine are inside the pressure hull, or whether they are inside the nose and tail sections. The nose looks like it might have some room, but the tail section looks a little small. I'm thinking the tanks used to submerge the submarine must be inside the pressure hull. I suppose it doesn't really matter. You are going to have doors to the outside, and you will need to be able to seal those doors against extreme pressures, so against that a few valves to allow flooding the tanks is probably not a big deal.

DarkGovernment has a good statement of this submarine's impressive capabilities.

Update March 2019 replaced Picasa slideshow with photo and link to album.