Anti-circular-run feature. Which is what happened to the Tang, among other boats - Not always fatally. The other safety referred to is one designed to prevent premature detonation during impulse - Impulsing a fish is a very violent maneuver. You don’t want something going wrong with the fuzing of the warhead at that time.
The Soviets most certainly did have wire-guided torpedoes at that time. Their first tested wire-guided torpedo was in 1969.
BTW: Depending on which edit of the movie you watch, you can get ten seconds of the back of my head in the control room of the “Dallas” (actually the USS Houston). No, I wasn’t crew - I was on another boat at that time, and was one of the volunteers selected to play extras. One of my shipmates got a speaking role, and another can be seen cascading sparks down the side of the boat hull in the “Graving Dock” (Actually, the USS Arco, ARDM-5, San Diego).
One of the Russian naval satellites had actually picked up the Red October on some kind of thermal imaging, but since they had already given the Russian officer equipment from the RO as “proof” that it exploded, the Russians just assumed it was an American boomer and left the Alfa behind (which was kind of stupid - Alfas were fast & noisy). When the Dallas & other 688 were escorting the RO back, and realized there was a Russian sub in the area, Ramius went back to the caterpillar drive, which was a huge mistake - Tupolev had been involved in the early trials and knew exactly what the RO sounded like, so he reverted to his earlier orders. Had any other captain been there, or had Ramius just stuck to propellors, the Alfa would never have fired on the RO.
Although I can’t find anything definitive offhand, the Project 941 Akula ballistic missile submarine (NATO reporting name Typhoon, not to be confused with the Project 971 Shchuka, for which the NATO reporting name is Akula) doesn’t appear to have a towed array. The submarine shown in the movie as the Red October does appear to have a hump that could be the deployable towed array, but the vessel is never shown using it. We can speculate that it would interfere with the drive, or that Ramius thought it unnecessary (as it would have to be retracted when running the underwater range and performing quick turns that could foul the gear). In the film, at least, Ramius believed that the Red October would be completely invisible to any tracking vessels.
The final sub-to-sub battle in the film is modestly absurd, but in ways that would only be evident to someone familiar with the details of submarine combat, and makes for a lively scene. The scenario posited in the novel was more realistic but not as cinematic.
Sam Neill has a bland American accent? He sounds like an Aussie doing an impression of Boris from Bullwinkle. While none of the actors made a credible effort to sound Russian (even when they speak phonetic Russian their words are too sharply annunciated) Connery’s accent stands out as a pronounced Scottish burr, as it does in every film he is in. He’s the only Irish cop I’ve ever seen that sounds like he’s from Edinburgh. He does play the role well, although nothing like the character in the book.
Neill doesn’t typically sport the broad, Cockney-derived accent that is generally associated with Australians (thanks largely to Paul Hogan) but definitely not quite General American English, at least insofar as his annunciation is too clipped and precise, and has a distinct drawl on the “r” sound and not mucking the vowels. (The difference between the European English “lab-OR-atory” and the GAE “LAB-or-tory” or often “LAB-ro-tory”.)
In Hunt For Red October, Neill actually approximates a Russian as well or better than the other actors portraying the crew in somewhat slurring hard secondary consonants and placing the emphasis upon succeeding syllables. “I vood like toh have seen Ameh-ee-CAH.” Connery’s accent–whether he is speaking phonetic Russian or English–is distinctly Scottish, and was hilarious to my independent studies Russian language group that went to see the film. (“Ryan, be careful whatch you shoot at. Some thingsh in here don’t reactsh well to bulletsh.”) Tim Curry’s surgeon, on the other hand, has a ludicrous accent that doesn’t seem to come from anywhere in particular.
It’s an entertaining film, but don’t take too much away from it as being verbatim to submarine operations (though still far closer than the execrable Crimson Tide). Das Boot remains the definitive film on what life is like on a submarine, albeit of the WWII German U-boat variety.
Resurrecting this thread because I just flipped on the movie a while ago and it was at this very scene and I had a follow-up question:
Granted, I’m pretty sure it’s pure Hollywood BS that a single torpedo will just explode the shit out of a submarine in that way, unless that submarine is literally made of explosives, the same way cars do not just explode because they crashed into anything, but pretending that particular detail was realistic…
If the torpedo passed the Red October close enough for the torpedo to miss them and hit the other sub, shouldn’t the destruction of that sub also have destroyed, or at least severely damaged, the Red October as well?
Couple things. Sam Neill is a New Zealander, not an Australian.
Second, a torpedo isn’t designed to explode a submarine. It just makes a little crack, and the ocean does the rest of the work. Whether the resulting “ocean crushing the submarine like a beer can” can fairly be described as an explosion is up to your personal preference.
