So is one allowed to know the position and heading of the boat so as to know the direction of Mecca?
Ah. I didn’t realize that 688’s tied up at foreign ports. Do ballistic missile subs dock at foreign ports also, or only in the US?
I have to ask - why “allegedly”? Are their rumors his severed head is frozen with Walt Disney’s or something?
Did ST3 Bob the “Beauty Queen” find his career path closed after that pic?
Thank you to you and robby for doing this thread.
On mrAru’s first boat [USS Spadefish SSN668 ] they had some interesting crew members. Alex Ashley and Monday spring to mind. Ever see the movie The Replacements, the 2 gang members? About that size. There was an officer that was well over 6 feet tall, he walked with a stoop and a permanent bruise on his forehead. Tafflinger, one of the A gang[engineering] was a big blond guy next door sort of guy also over 6 feet tall.
Oddly enough, the shortest guy I ever saw in the Navy was with a helicopter mine squadron out of Norfolk, he might have been5 feet tall if he was lucky. Mike used to joke they liked him because they could stuff him inside to repair things without having to remove various cowlings.
:smack: Duh.
Never happened while I was onboard, but I did hear stories, of course. When I was on that missile boat, someone had reportedly opened a toilet ball valve during the previous patrol with sans pressurized. The story was that he was slipping on the crap and throwing up simultaneously so badly that someone else had to go in to fully shut the valve. The guy did nothing but clean up crap for the next few watches.
The valve was tagged out, and the guy knew about the tag, but figured he’d just go and flush later. Then he forgot about the “flushing later” part…
No real restriction today, except for extremely tall people. I’m 5’-10" and there were lots of people taller than me.
People are of normal stature. Tall guys bump their heads a lot.
When going on long deployments, there is not nearly enough room in the food lockers to supply food for months on end. What’s done is that every passageway is filled with No. 10 cans of food, with black rubber matting laid over the cans. This has the effect of raising the deck height by about 6 inches. Every then has to walk around hunched over, or you end up with a permanent welt on your forehead from banging your head.
Fast attack boats do indeed tie up at foreign ports, but the topside watch is always armed, even in home port.
Missile boats do not generally tie up at foreign ports, though years ago they did routinely because of the shorter range of missiles then. Many subs operated out of Holy Loch, Scotland. The missile boat I rode was out of there.
Give all the credit to 1010011010. I’m just tagging along. 
Were you ever tempted by the flesh-pots of Dunoon?
Dear Nuclear Submariner,
I gave notice to be out of my apartment on November 1. I don’t really have a new apartment yet. Is it okay to tell the landlord “just kidding I’m staying”?
-Almost Homeless
You deal with the lack of sunlight by going into a profession where you can be outside as much as possible once you get out of the Navy. Also, you insist on a desk next to a window. 
Circadian rhythms get screwed up more than you can imagine. A typical watch rotation is 6 hours on watch, 12 off. However, during your twelve off, you have your normal job to do as well. There are all-hands drills every day after lunch, and training every weekday morning for those not on watch.
A typical rotation goes like this:
Day 1:
0600-1200: watch
1300: all hands drills
early evening: get some sleep
Day 2
0000-0600: watch (all night)
0700-1130: training
1130-1300: skip lunch, sleep instead
1300: drills–wake up to sound of general alarm
1800-2400: watch
Day 3:
0000-0600: SLEEP
0700-1130: training
1200-1800: watch
Day 4:
Same as Day 1
In between the watch schedule, as I mentioned, you have your normal job to do. Admin stuff for officers and chiefs; maintenance for junior enlisted.
You also work on quals in your free time. However, there’s not a lot of free time. God help you if you relax to watch a movie, and are behind in your quals. Until you get your Qualification in Submarines, you’re behind in your quals.
The above schedule is screwed up even more if you are at battle stations or section tracking party. During battle stations, all hands are up. Section tracking party is like battle stations for the people whose battle stations are in the control room. I’ve had those go on for weeks. You might find yourself at your battle station all day, then have to take the midwatch all night.
Yes, subs rig for red at night, and rig for black when going to periscope depth.
This is incorrect. USS San Juan (SNN-751) broke through the ice during ICEX 93. They made a big deal of it at the time, and no, it’s not classified.
The photo of San Juan breaking through the ice replaced the standard photo used for the boat. I know–because one of my collateral duties was the photo officer, and I actually took the shot in the Spring of 1993.
Since becoming the standard photo for the boat, I’ve seen it everywhere. Here’s a few links:
http://www.csp.navy.mil/asl/ScrapBook/Boats/SanJuan1993.jpg
http://www.cnrc.navy.mil/nucfield/media/ship%20gifs/ssn751.gif
(Note, the photo in the first link is reversed, for some reason.)
Finally, here’s an official cite for our breaking the ice:
Sounds about right…
I recall hearing that some nuclear submarines were designed/modified to act as emergency power plants for cities, to be used after disasters knocked out civ sources.
True?
So were you still on the San Juan in 95 when my father in law did a tiger cruise from Ft Lauderdale to Groton with Rob?
Oddly enough, we seem to have a glossy picture of the SJ in the ice=) I think it in the same box as his Bluenose and Magellan certs=)
I never did a dependants cruise on the SJ, but Ii did on the Miami. it was a lot of fun, I hid down in machinery 1 with the guys since I knew a majority of them and I hate most of the wives and don’t really think kids belong on a boat underway…
Whenever submarines are in the news (San Francisco, Kursk, MSP, etc) it usually becomes a topic of conversation.
Rickover is the only person that comes to mind… I’d call him “notorious” rather than “iconic” or “heroic”. It’s difficult to become an icon when all your heroic deeds are classified.
Most? I think that’s included in the history training in bootcamp. I don’t actually recall where I learned about The Turtle (or The Hunley, for that matter), but it’s some standard bit of trivia somewhere along the way.
We’ve got a guy who’s 6’7". It may be discouraged by individual recruiters, but it isn’t a policy. Also, the old timers are not remarkably short, so it probably hasn’t been policy for a while.
It’s more fun to tie the string taut at depth and let the hull stretch it… while twanging it and letting the pitch change. I’ve no idea how much real motion occurs. Less than 1%.
Depends how it was implemented. It would not go over very well to have a single person in a multi-bunk female berthing area while the male half of the crew is hot racking. Mixed sex hot racking assignments would pose a different set of problems, of course. The question is whether the powers that be try to make it easier on the first volunteers (And thus make it harder by turning the existing crews against them in poorly understood ways) or treat them like equals with a predictably (and probably unacceptably) high failure rate.
The discussion tends to swing around to sexual harassment. If I’m groping around in berthing while the lights are out and get a handful of another crewmember, hey, shit happens, you carry on. If you’re trying to step over or squeeze by someone in a passageway, it’s common to put a hand on them to let them know you’re there (it reminds me of bartending in a way). If you have three people balanced on the ladder in the forward escape trunk handing down cans of food for a stores load, somebody’s face is in somebody else’s bathing suit area. There’s a lot of stuff that goes on day-to-day that nobody thinks once, much less twice, about that could get blown totally out of proportion when you change the sex of one of the people involved.
Nope. I also lived in Florida for 2 years and never went to Disney world. I have been on the USS Blueback (SS-581) at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry. That thing is tiny.
Nope, nor have we surfaced underneath Japanese fishing boats. We’ve had larger merchant ships drive over us and almost get sucked into their screws.
The majority of the crew is on 18 hour days underway (three section rotation, six hour shifts).
No. Control will switch to red if they’re using the periscope at night. Otherwise it’s full-spectrum fluorescent 18/9.333!
There are a number of different ways to find out. It’s not a secret (well, it is Secret.), but it’s not like they have a “You Are Here!” GPS display as seen on some long-haul airline flights.
Most of the reactor power is designed to be directed to the main engine turbines, which drives the sub’s screw (propeller).
Only a relatively small percentage of the steam produced is capable of being directed to the Ship’s Service Turbogenerators (SSTGs), and power transfer is further limited by amperage limits of the shore power cables.
Power can be transferred off the boat, but probably not enough to run a city. My back of the envelope calcs estimate that a submarine could power a few thousand residential homes.
If you could somehow use all of the energy produced by a submarine reactor for electricity production, the number of homes that could be powered would go up by at least an order of magnitude or more, but there is no easy way to do this.
:smack: Scranton was the first 688 to surface at the North Pole (in 2001, as stated).
Maybe in the Russian Navy.
It’s theoretically possible, but wouldn’t have much practical value due to the power limits and inefficiency. The civilian grid would also have to be set up to accept the power… which probably isn’t the case.
Rig for Black? 
'Splain please
robby’s given different answers on this than I have, so there would appear to be some variation from boat to boat or platform to platform.
“Rig for black” means they lower black-out curtains the the area immediately around the periscopes… so even the dim red light in the rest of Control doesn’t have the chance of shining out through the optics and giving away the boat’s position.
If it’s daytime, no particular lighting set-up is employed in control.
Most of the lighting in the boat is not visible from outside, is white fluorescent, and usually cannot be turned off except by a breaker in a distribution panel. Berthing will usually have a rig-for-red option because the white lights are usually off while underway - someone is always in their “on coming” (i.e. sleep-before-watch) time. The mess decks also have light switches so they can be turned off if a movie is being shown.
Coolest interment ever!
This is probably the most interesting thread I’ve read on the Dope. Thanks, 1010011010.