What’s the situation with parts/repairs when something breaks down?Do you make your own in dire cases? I had an old Kearny& Trecker universal milling maching that came off a destroyer (so the seller said-had Navy stamps and paint) but subs are a little small for that,no?
What sort of air compressor does the boat use,what capacity tanks are used to store the air,and how many PSI is it under?
Whenever I see sub movies,even modern ones-there’s always a pair of dividers on the map in the chartroom.Is this anachronism or fact,given GPS etc.?
1010011010,glad you got what you wanted.
Do you pronounce the noun in your title
SUB ma REEN er
or
sub MARE in er?
Declan
OK, extremely ancient mariner here. S I got out in '80 and my poor old boat SSBN 620 has long ago been turned into razor blades. Anyway, yes. We used to have trim parties every now and then. They were reserved for the most obnoxious of junior officers, the Lt. JGs who arrived thinking they were Admiral Nimitz.
There are some good stories about those.
Regards
Testy
Yeah , i can imagine.
It would be nice if someone ever wrote the definite book on that, why should the snake eaters get all the press.
Declan
Declan
I wish I had the writing skills. There are so many things that would be interesting; the constant smell of amine and the feeling of sensory deprivation after a month or so. The astoundingly-intense taste of something like a piece of fruit-leather that you’ve stashed, or the pervasive 400Hz hum from all the servos and transformers. I used to sit in the ESM booth during mid watches when it was totally black except for a few red instrument lights. I’d have some of that instant Vienna coffee that I’d bring along and a smoke usually and then put on the headphones and listen on the UQN for dolphins, whales and other sea beasties.
As far as practical jokes go, there were quite a few. On half-way night someone put a blow-up love doll in the CO’s rack. He got on the 1MC and offered to give it back but I don’t think anyone took him up on it. Other things like putting prussian blue on a telephone earpiece and then calling someone. If you were surfaced, you could do the same thing with black binocular eye pieces. A guy accidentally got the XO this way once. The problem then is; who’s gonna tell him?
There are a lot of customs that don’t apply on surface ships. Things like wearing sneakers on patrol which is both comfortable and sensible from a noise standpoint. Patrol hats. The crew’s mess and the wardroom serving the same food. Different plates, but the same food. (This was a particularly bad custom to violate, one supply officer wound up with five gallons of chocolate ice cream in his bunk for forgetting this) Movie night, with the inevitable search for people behind on the quals that would dare to take time to watch a movie. Then there was the “Why Not?” club, a particularly hair-raising batch of porn that could be checked-out and was kept and enhanced from patrol to patrol. It was usually held by the missile techs as they had the most secure area and the necessary space.
There was also the more serious stuff like the feeling you get when there is a drill called a COMCONEX that simulates going to war. These are as real as they can possibly make them and the first time it happens you think “Oh shit! My family’s just been incinerated and I’m next.”
Like I say, I wish I had the writing skills to create a book on this. The experiences are astoundingly vivid even now, almost 30 years after I left the service.
Regards
Testy
Well, mrAru wqas part of an impromptu trim party once … they had a chief of the watch nobody liked so they got about 8000 lbs of guys and they went from the extreme forward to the extreme back [the dive officer was in on the joke] resulting in the newly qualified chief of the watch trying to tell the dive officer how to trim the vessel as the bubble kept changing without the input of the helm. He never did figure out what was happening, and finally gave up trying to tell the dive officer what to do.
Blue sominex and taping parties =)
Did you hear of the Minister for Defence who visited Faslane and reported back to Parliament that everything was sub-standard? 
:smack: My bad.
Another former ELT speaking up. Whee… that’s going to be fun for Nukes and ELTs through the fleet.
Do you feel comfortable telling which test it was? I’m guessing it was one of the long lived radioactivitity tests, from what you’re saying, but that’s just a guess.
We have a limited capacity to machine replacement parts. It’s mostly a matter of there being lockers crammed full of spare parts everywhere, and all the systems having redundancy and reduced capacity operation in their basic design.
Asking for numbers isn’t going to get much in way of a response. We have high pressure and low pressure air compressors. ¦¬)
If the boat is still using physical charts, they’re still plotted the old fashioned way, yes. And even if the boat has a super-duper computerized GPS-track interfaced plotting system… they still have the stuff on board to do it the old fashioned way for when all that cool nifty crap breaks.
Funny.
Er… On an SSN it’s called watch turnover?
If you weren’t active in the past ten years or so, you probably didn’t have to deal with it. If that’s any indication of its imprtance-- you probably just didn’t do it because they hadn’t thought it up yet.
Fair enough. I was in so long ago, I was actually a nuke cruiser sailor, so - yeah, if it’s at all recent, I’ve got no idea about it.
So, how does a trim party work? Does everyone walk through the control room without being noticed? Does everyone run from amidships to far astern/bow, or is there a second deck where everyone can pass unnoticed by the control room?
Modern U.S. submarines have three decks. In fact, going through the control room if you don’t have business there is discouraged.
Only the middle level runs continuously from the forward compartment to the engine room, though.
Ah…
1010011010,
Again,thanks for replying.
The “type of compressor” question was simply,screw,or piston.Both?Or something else again?
“Asking for numbers isn’t going to get much in way of a response.”
Is this reply non-committal due to being classified,or, that it is out of your area of expertise?
My curiousity comes from thinking that it would require an enormous volume of air to purge water out of tanks,let alone pressurized water;that once submerged;there is no more air to be had short of electrolysis;and that such a system,due to compressability of gases,is orders of magnitude more dangerous than topside AIR compressors,which though “low pressure” are still hazardous.
Your parting comment to me,in post #90,-“Funny.” - is that one of those hindsight,“be careful what you wish for” things?
Part of the problem is that Navy personnel are trained that specific numbers of ny sort are usually classified on some level, and shouldn’t be dissemenated to the general public. As such the wise squid won’t give answers to things like “How fast does your ship go?” “What’s your boat’s test depth?” and the like. And since I believe that you’re correct that compressed air is used for ememergency ballast tank blows it’s not quite as senselessly paranoid a caution to avoid saying how high HP air gets to. If you knew the max pressure, and knew the volume of the hull of a submarine, you’d probably be able to back a guess towards test depth from those numbers, by using some common sense (for naval architects, at least) assumptions about how much of the hull volume is taken up by ballast tanks vice the pressure hull.
I don’t pretend it would be an easy thing to calculate, but it’s not as insane a restriction as you may think it is.
FWIW, from my experience training on a submarine’s engineering plant, the navy classifies LP air at anything less than 125# IIRC, and the HP air was much higher.
Otaku Loki,thanks for exposing my naivete with your informative answer-I hadn’t considered the nefarious treason behind the reverse engineering involved,but I am thinking of the construction thereof,coming from a background of metal fabrication and high pressure piping.But I gave up trying to build subs in my teens.
Carson
You’re right, it takes a HUGE volume of air to blow the ballast tanks at depth. I wouldn’t say any more really than Otaku did above but you are correct in your idea that you can’t replenish the high-pressure air while submerged below snorkel depth. Electrolysis is not very useful for the volume of air you’d need and besides, compressing hydrogen would be a scary thing on a boat. HP air gets used for other things as well. Pushing torpedoes out the tube at any serious depth would be a big drain.
Just as a piece of background information, you don’t blow the ballast tanks very often but tend to drive up or down using a neutral or almost neutral buoyancy and the planes.
Regards
Testy
It’s classified. As a qualified submariner (and a nuke), there is no question that 1010011010 knows exactly what the capacity and pressure of the high pressure air tanks are.
To second OtakuLoki, Navy personnel tend to shy away from any questions involving specific numbers. That’s why I pointed people earlier in this thread to this official link which lists the unclassified answers for a number of common questions of this type.
Testy,I just learned something from you.
Robby,I read whatever I can about subs,but you understand when someone starts a thread for the purpose of answering questions on the very matter some of us might not know where the “classified” line is.