Sonar

How the Navy Hears Subs 3,000 Miles Away. (It's Genius)
Second Order Science

Previous related posts:

• SOSUS - my run-in with SOSUS in college
• Star Trek Science - submarines so quiet they can't hear each other

Wikipedia:

• SOSUS
• SOFAR Channel

Whale Graveyard

Whale graveyard discovered 7km under the sea
nature video

The submarine is Chinese and seems to be quite capable. A far cry and 66 years from the first crewed descent in the Mariana Trench. It was done by the Swiss-designed, Italian-built, United States Navy-owned bathyscaphe Trieste, which reached the bottom at 1:06 pm on 23 January 1960, with Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard on board.

Seems the Chinese are busy, getting involved in all kinds of things. They seem to be our biggest competitor these days. Russia seems to be rather preoccupied with Ukraine, but they are still messing about in Africa, though I don't know how effective that is. On the other hand, we are doing something about Iran, or at least I thought we were. I still think Iran needs to be pounded flat until the clerics lose their hold over the country. I mean Iran is basically a boil on civilization and it needs to be popped. Remember, they killed 30,000 protestors less than a year ago. I guess Russia and China don't mind dealing with Iran as they are familiar with mass murder as well.

Via Bayou Renaissance Man

Steampunk Submarine

Steampunk Submarine

I seem to fall fallen into a hole lately, I've been spending rather too much time doing these jigsaw puzzles. This one appears to be a rather elaborate depiction of a silly submarine originally designed for a Saturday morning cartoon show.

Russian Nuclear Powered Weapons

A computer model of the Burevestnik missile. © RT

Russia claims that this nuclear powered missle made a 9,000 mile test flight. That's a very good trick. I don't know how it works, but the only way I can think of is that it operates like a ramjet. In that case they would use a conventional rocket to boost it up to cruising velocity where there is enough air coming in. The air is heated in the reactor and then it escapes out the back. If they can do that without spreading radiation far and wide, that would be a VERY good trick.

NATO's designation is Skyfall, which you may remember was the name of a James Bond movie from 2012.

The development of the Poseidon underwater drone. ©  Russian Defense Ministry

In season 3 of the Netflix show The Diplomat, our players got themselves twisted in knots over a Russian submarine that was carrying a Poseidon drone that sank off the coast of England.

While these weapons are fearsome, I don't think it is worth worrying about them. I mean, we already have enough nuclear armed conventional missiles to destroy the world should someone get a burr up their ass.

On the plus side, they might prompt our nuclear engineers to develop our own miniature nuclear reactor, assuming they haven't already done so and are just keeping it under wraps. Miniature nuclear reactors could be very handy for just about anything people want to do. Assuming they can figure out how to deal with the radioactive byproducts.

How a World War Two Submarine Works

How a World War Two Submarine Works
Animagraffs

This video is fantastic. I had a general idea of what went into a submarine, but I've never seen is laid out so clearly and completely. Geez, these things were complicated, and we're not even looking at what goes into all those analog remote controls and gauges. 

Another Nautilus

What Happened To The Nautilus?
Mustard

I had not heard of this Nautilus before. I have heard of the one from Jule's Vernes 20,000 leagues Under The Sea, and I have heard about the US Navy's first nuclear powered submarine, but not this one.

Breaking the Ice

USS Annapolis (SSN 760) rests in the Arctic Ocean after surfacing through three feet of ice during Ice Exercise 2009 on March 21, 2009

Found this photo on The Geopolitics. Found the description on reddit.

Valentin Submarine Factory

Bunker Valentin 🇩🇪 The largest submarine bunker in the world
Blitzwinkel

Cool video, the music makes it. Located outside of Bremen, Germany, it is the largest submarine bunker in the world, if your world is Germany. The one in Brest, France, is larger. This one was never finished. If looks like a massive amount of concrete. It took 650,000 yards of concrete to build it. That is enough concrete to pave 13 miles of Interstate Highway. Considering that there are like a zillion miles of Interstate highways, this massive chunk is insignificant. How can that be? The mind works in mysterious ways.

It is easily visible on Google Maps. 

Wikipedia has page about it.

Mike Vining

Mike Vining

Saw a video by a very annoying guy about Mike Vining, who was one of the first members of Delta Force. He was involved in a bunch of very sketchy stuff, like bomb disposal. He's still alive and just a year older than I am. Reading the Wikipedia story about him I come across this line:

"He has also written articles on naval postal history,"

Naval Postal History? What are you talking about? The Navy has a postal system? Well, I guess they would have to, wouldn't they? Letters to and from for sailors sailing around the world. This leads me to the Univeral Ship Cancellation Society which has a PDF about Naval Covers Fakes, Forgeries and Frauds. 

On page 59 of this PDF we find a story by Mike Vining:

1931 Wilkins-Ellsworth Trans-Arctic Expedition

Sir George Hubert Wilkins, MC, and Lincoln Ellsworth secured use from the U.S. Navy of the soon to be scrapped submarine USS S-30 for an expedition to sail under the ice cap to the North Pole. They got close to the North Pole, but no cigar. They managed to return to Norway and submarine was scuttled off of Bergen.

I tried to extract the story from the PDF, but it was going to take a bunch of mucking around to make it presentable, so you're just going to have to go read the original.

Jules Verne - Nautilus

Inside the Nautilus of Jules Verne: an internal arrangement for the famous sub
We Travel by Night

This video is great. This guy has gone to some trouble to construct a model of the Nautilus submarine from the 19th century novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under The Seas by Jules Verne. The video takes us on a tour of this virtual model along with some explanation of how he derived it from the explanations in the book.

He also has a couple of other videos about specific aspects of the Nautilus. You can find them here.

He references The Vernian Era, which has multiple pages about the book and the submarine. You can easily get lost in there for hours.

JFD's submersible SEAL carrier

U.S. Navy SEALS Insane Powerboat Submarine
VEXR

You spend enough time watching YouTube Shorts and eventually something totally unexpected pops up. I see reports of new drones (land, sea and air), armored troop carriers, artillery and tanks everyday. I've seen reports of submarines carrying James Bond like mini-subs, but this is the first time I've seen this thing. It also has a baby brother:

JFD Shadow Seal & Carrier Seal JFD

That business of 'taking too long to pressurize' in the first video doesn't make much sense. Making a hull that would be able to withstand even a little pressure would be about ten times as difficult and would at least double the weight making it much more expensive and difficult to transport.

JFD is based in the UK, their headquarters are just outside of Glasgow, Scotland.

Death in the Depths

Titan Submersible

The loss of the Titan submersible along with the five people aboard has been in the news this week. They were going down to look at the Titanic. There hasn't been much in the way of detail, so I thought I'd chime in.

A pint's a pound, the world around. A cubic foot of water holds eight gallons and a gallon holds eight pints, so a cubic foot of water weighs 64 pounds. A square foot is 144 square inches, so a column of water one foot high with a square cross section of one inch will weigh about half a pound. The Titanic is lying at a depth of 12,500 feet (roughly two and a half miles straight down from the surface). To determine how much pressure there is at that depth, you multiply 12,500 (the depth in feet) by one half (the weight of one foot of water) and you get 6,250 pounds or about three tons of pressure per square inch. Since the surface of Titan is thousands of square inches, the total pressure pushing in this little bubble of air is like zillions of tons.

Some people have pointed out that carbon fiber was used in the construction of the submersible, and noted that carbon fiber is very strong in tension and is almost useless in compression. So while carbon fiber may have been used in construction of the submersible, there must have been some other material included in the mix that does have good strength in compression. Concrete, steel or aluminum would all be valid choices. James Cameron used steel in his submersible.

Forging the steel pilot sphere for Deepsea Challenger
James Cameron took it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench,
which is three times deeper than the Titanic

Torpedos

Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo

Defence Blog tells us that Lockheed-Martin, the Pentagon's number one weapons supplier,

. . . was awarded $16,8 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract in support of the Mark 48 heavyweight torpedo efforts.

I like the "cost-plus-incentive-fee" bit. How fast can we pour money down the drain?

But it does get me thinking about torpedos. The Wikipedia article about the Mark 48 tells us:

The swashplate piston engine is fueled by Otto fuel II, a monopropellant which combusts to drive the engine.

Swashplate engines are kind of cool, they are compact, roughly the shape of a Wankel rotary engine like you can find in the Mazda sports car, but Otto fuel II, that's something else. Being a monopropellant means you don't need an oxidizer. Near as I can tell it's based on nitrogylcerine but they have done things to it to make it stable. It gets sprayed into the combustion chamber and ignited with a spark where the resulting explosion drives the piston. It's nasty stuff, you don't want to get any on you and the exhaust fumes are deadly poison. In a torpedo the exhaust gets pumped into the ocean where it is seriously diluted, so it probably doesn't kill too many fish. Probably.

Now I am reminded of the Russian nuclear powered torpedo. Putin announced it a couple of years ago but I haven't heard much about it since then.

Can Russia's Doomsday Weapon Be Stopped? Status-6/Poseidon
Covert Cabal[The video has an advertisement that runs for one minute starting from the one minute mark.]

Poseidon is big - over five feet in diameter and 80 feet long - which makes it like 35 times the volume of the Mark 48 and likely 35 times the mass.

Now I am reminded of the search for the missing flight 370 airliner in the Indian Ocean.

INDIAN OCEAN (April 14, 2014) Operators aboard the Australian navy vessel ADF Ocean Shield move U.S. Navy's Bluefin-21 into position for deployment. Using side scan sonar, Bluefin will descend to a depth of between 4,000 and 4,500 meters, approximately 35 meters above the ocean floor to spend up to 16 hours at this depth collecting data. Joint Task Force 658 is supporting Operation Southern Indian Ocean, searching for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Peter D. Blair/Released)

They were using a torpedo to look for the wreck. They didn't find it, but then the torpedo they were using wasn't nuclear powered, so it had limited range and endurance. But if we had a nuclear powered torpedo, we could set it to searching and it could search the entire ocean. It might take a while, but then we would know what is down there.

There have been nuclear powered submarines cruising the oceans for decades and they probably have been accumulating a great deal of data about the ocean floor, but maybe not. Submarines only go down to about a thousand feet and most of the world's oceans are much deeper than that, so deep that the submarines can't 'see' the bottom.

Drones Я Us

Shark reconnaissance drone

The Shark is entirely a Ukrainian creation.  

It carries a day-light camera, a thermal imaging camera, a video camera and a radio transmitter in a gyro-stabilized camera pod that is fitted under the nose of the fuselage. - Defence Blog

Seems drones are all the rage these days.

REMUS 620 UUV(unmanned underwater vehicle)

The REMUS 620 UUV is is made by HII (Huntington Ingalls Industries), the largest military shipbuilding company in the United States. It's powered by batteries like a torpedo, but it has a range of 275 miles. Plus it has an electronic brain so supposedly it can find it's way home if it every gets lonely. Defence Blog talks about how it can be loaded up all kinds of gizmos, they don't say anything about a warhead, but they don't say that it can't.

P.S. When I saw HII in the Defence Blog post I thought it said HILL. That's what you get when you use them cheap fonts where you can't tell a lowercase L from an uppercase i.

Antique Nuclear Submarine

The Soviet Union's first nuclear submarine, Leninsky Komsomol, is transported from a pier to a museum in the city of Kronstadt, outside St. Petersburg, Russia, on October 12, 2022.

It was launched in 1957 which makes it 75 years old. It weighs 3,000 tons which is like 1/6 of what a Trident missile sub weighs. It has a beam of 25 feet which means the top of the sail in this picture looks to be about 50 feet from the ground.

Pump Jet

United States Navy's submarine New Jersey (SSN 796) was recently launched into the James River

It's been in a dry dock for the last month or so, so presumably 'launching it' means flooding the dry dock and letting it float out into the river. Might be kind of cool to watch that happening, but that's not why we're here.

We're here because of this line I found at the end of the Defense Blog's story:

These submarines are capable of supporting multiple mission areas and can operate at speeds of more than 25 knots for months at a time.

"25 knots for months at a time"!?! I know nuclear submarines can go very fast, for a submarine, and I know they can stay submerged for months on end, but can they really run at full speed for that long? I mean, they are nuclear powered, so they should be able to produce lots of power continuously, but it just seems like you're asking for trouble to do that. Stress, vibration and heat can all lead to important metal bits cracking, which can lead to all kinds of trouble. So this got me intrigued.

Over at Wikipedia, I find that the submarine gang has been busy cooking up all kinds fancy stuff. 

Submarine Secrets: Pump Jets And Propellers Explained
H I Sutton

The Virginia class submarines (the New Jersey is one) use a pump-jet propulsion system. Remember The Hunt for Red October and stealthy, super secret caterpillar drive it used? I had some vague idea about these new submarine drives, but I didn't realize how rapidly they have developed.

Submarine Masts

Virgina class submarines have see-by-wire periscopes called photonics masts. Basically it's digital camera on a stick. Optical periscopes (which all submarines used in the 20th century) were basically giant hydraulic rams that ran vertically through the center of the control room, from the top of the sail to the keel. The photonic mast does away with most of that. I imagine they still have a hydraulic ram to extend or retract the mast, but it's short one and lives entirely within the sail (the big fin sticking up out the top center of a submarine). They just need one little skinny hole for the wire to go inside the hull. From there you can run it anywhere you want. Google served up the above picture, but the site where it originated only has a video, and that video has been taken down, so all we have is this splash screen.

The Virginia-class attack submarine Mississippi (SSN 782) Masts
U.S. Navy photo by Chief Mass Communication Specialist Ryan G. Wilber

Those masts are a lot bigger than they look in the previous picture.

These submarines can travel at 25 knots and maybe even 40 knots, but no word on how long they can keep it up.

Marching Towards War with Russia & General Mis-Management

USS Mississippi

Links:

• Biden Stumbles Toward War - Russians Move On U.S. Submarine - Sam Faddis
• War with Russia Can Explode - Michael Yon
• “Our Democracy” is Rule by a Hidden Cabal - JMSmith

I'm not sure about any of this. I don't doubt that the men behind the curtain are calling the shots, but the chaotic orders coming out of Washington tells me that not all of those guys behind the curtain are in agreement about what should be done, which means there is probably some vicious in-fighting going on. Or it's possible that the guys who are actually running the show are too busy with other more important matters and don't have time to to be bothered with whatever shenanigans Biden and his staff are getting up to.

Urup Island, part of the Kiril Islands
The big island in the center is Hokkaido, the northernmost main Japanese island
Vladivostok, Russia, is on the left

Urup island is where the Russians claim to have chased off a US submarine.

Narco Submarines and the Strange Economics of Cocaine Smuggling

Simon uses 'street value' of the drugs to show how much money is being made. If we figure 100% markup at each stage of distribution and you figure 6 or 7 levels of distribution between the producers and the street dealers, then the producers are getting like 1% of the street value, packers and loaders get 2%, shippers get 4%, receivers and national wholesale distributors get 8%, regional distributors get 16% and local distributors and street dealers can fight over the remaining 70%. The last group may be getting the lion's share of the money, but there are zillions of them, their individual volumes are small so each one isn't making all that much money. There is a lot of competition at the retail end of the business which might be why the homicide rate is so high in big cities. I mean, if you have a dispute with another drug dealer, you can't very well complain to the police, can you?

Previous post about submersibles.

Nobuo Fujita

Nobuo Fujita

Almost Chosen People has a fine story about the time that Nobuo Fujita tried to set fire to the forests outside Brookings, Oregon. This was back during WW2 and Nobuo was flying an airplane, an airplane launched from a submarine. Wait a minute, didn't I post something about this submarine once before? 

I did, though it was the I-400, a successor to the I-25. Both were huge. The I-25 was 350 feet long, the I-400 was 400 feet long.

Brookings (Google Map) is on the coast just about five miles from the California border.

Via Head Noises

Flight

Michigan shoreline seen from the nose of the B-25

Uniberp took a flight on a B-25 with Air Adventure. He reports:

You can't see it in this picture, in fact that's not the Muskegon channel at all, but as we were flying over the flight officer painted down out the window and said "submarine" pointing to the USS Silversides at dock. Sitting duck.

There are a couple of other lakes just inside the shoreline like Lake Muskegon within a few miles. 

USS Silversides in the Muskegon Channel

Since he didn't get a shot of the sub, I thought I'd take a look using Google Maps.

B-25 Rosie's Reply

In case you didn't know:

The B-25B first gained fame as the bomber used in the 18 April 1942 Doolittle Raid, in which 16 B-25Bs led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle attacked mainland Japan, four months after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. - Wikipedia