To expand on this, making the depth control computer-controlled means you’ve got one more thing that can break. And it would be guaranteed to break at the worst possible time, such as a combat situation. After all, these are vessels that are intended to be taken into harm’s way.
On the nuclear end of things, this was one of the philosophies espoused by Rickover, BTW. Make the procedures as idiot-proof as possible, and do as much as possible manually. The same philosophy has carried over to much of the rest of the boat.
There is a semi-automated system of depth control used for the ballistic missile submarines when launching missiles, though. This is because depth control is critical during such an evolution, and launching a 65-ton* Trident missile tends to make manual depth control difficult.
The only time I remember hearing a lot of hull noise was when we were driving in on the surface in heavy seas into Norway. We were doing 15-20 degree rolls in waves that must have been more than 20 feet. Every time we hit a wave, the bow came out of the water and slammed back into the sea. I was convinced the hull was going to fail with all of the noise.
For some reason, the wardroom mess attendant decided this was the time to put out a pitcher of orange juice for breakfast. I walked in just in time to see the pitcher hurl itself across the space and slam into a bulkhead. I decided to skip breakfast.
Robby
Ouch! I hope you didn’t do that for long. That was always the bad thing when the boat went to pd in rough weather. All the thing that should have been secured came flying off the top of lockers and things. On my boat there would always be a rain of coffee cups. Usually followed by an extremely pissed-off captain. Submarines are very cool boats but just aren’t staffed by the Ancient Mariner.
Another reason, to expand on those mentioned by other posters, is that the military, in general, doesn’t like solid-state electronics. Solid-state electronics are very sensitive to environmental factors - like humidity, or shocks. Both of which are common on surface ships, and not exactly unknown to subs.
Testy, I’d feel a lot better, myself, if civilian plants could do some of the training that Naval plants do as a matter of course. But for a number of reasons it’s just not possible.
AIUI one of the biggest differences between civlian and Naval plants is that the civilian plant is designed for constant operation at near 100% load. Naval plants are designed to be able to handle drastic changes in the power load, rather than one constant load. Another factor going to differences in design philosophies is that the ‘reactor bounce’ familiar to nuke sailors isn’t possible for civilian plants - the build-up of fission product poisons in a civilian plant after shutdown often makes a window when it’s impossible for the pile to produce enough neutrons to return to criticality.
Between these two factors it’s hard to run plant-affecting drills with any kind of realism in a civilian plant. And that doesn’t begin to consider the way that an electric utility’s customer base would respond to being told, “Because we have to train our reactor plant team, you’re going to be going to emergency power tonight.”
This doesn’t mean that I believe that civlilian nuclear power is unsafe, just explaining why I believe that they are less familiar with casualty operations than a Naval watchstanding team would be.
Yes, I imagine the customers would be a bit peevish over their electricity supply being cut off for the evening.
I’m a big believer in nuc power generation and have gotten into a few squabbles over the safety (or lack of it) in civilian nuc plants and could never quite understand their concern.
There are some legitimate concerns about nuclear power. The recent accident in Japan, where two workers were adding fissionable material by guess to a container, and it went critical, goes a long way to show what sort things can happen when workers either are not properly trained, or simply not thinking about what they’re doing in the press to meet production schedules.
Even without the possibility of bone-headed errors that can put the public at risk, there are serious, and reasonable, concerns about long-term storage of fission products.
I happen to believe, as you seem to, that compared to the alternatives currently available* nuclear power should still be seen as being viable. Anyone watching the reports filtering out of China regarding the Three Gorges Dam should be able to understand that there is no current technology that can generate electrical power without ecological consequences. But for many people emotion substitutes for reason when talking about anything nuclear related.
When I was in, you could receive up to ten 50-word “familygrams” per deployment (usually 6 months long). They were like telegrams, and were censored to prevent a sailor from getting upset in the event of bad news. (i.e. No submariner would get a “Dear John” familygram.)
Death announcements and the like were handled on a case-by-case basis. Often the family member would have to explain the situation to the squadron before the message would even be sent. If the sailor could be transferred off, they often would be.
Not sure how e-mail, etc. works on subs these days, as there was none of that when I was in. I suspect that all of that is limited to when a sub is on training exercises. On deployments, all outgoing transmissions were severely limited and had to be approved by the CO.
Loki
That was my concern. Most of the issues; waste, terrorists, contamination and the like, have some pretty good technological fixes. If those two Japanese guys had been trained as well as those I’m familiar with, they would have known what would happen and wouldn’t have added the additional material. After all, that must have been some very high-level stuff.
Anyway, thanks again and all the best.
Can you receive radio transmissions underwater? It is my understanding, certain very low frequency waves can penetrate the water to some distance. Is this correct, and if so how deep can you be and still receive a message. Thanks.
Hi robby! Once I saw there was a new submarine thread kicking around I’d hope to find you in here answering questions. There’s a lot of good info in here. I served on USS VIRGINIA (SSN 774), so I figure I’m in a position to provide a little info on the operation of a modern submarine, as opposed to you gentlemen and your relics.
The Virginia class submarines have completely replaced the ballast control panel and the rudder and plane yokes with the Ship Control System (SCS). The Chief of the Watch, Helmsman, and Planesman are no more–replaced by a Pilot and Copilot. You can see what it looks like here .
Most elements of ship’s control are automated now. Sure, you can still take the stick and drive the boat manually (as manual as FBW gets, anyway) or–God forbid–run back aft and operate the control surfaces locally. . .but otherwise it’s as simple as keying in your target depth and heading and allowing the pilot algorithm to take care of everything else.
If you look closely at that image, the leftmost screen that MMCS(SS) McIntire is operating is the Trim/HDC panel. You can, of course, still move water around manually if need be. (I was not Pilot qualified, but I believe the system was programmed to trim the ship taking the Mold In Place-Special Hull Treatment into consideration, which has a significant impact on buoyancy.)
A lot of old-school submariners initially cringed at the thought of fly-by-wire onboard submarines, but it worked beautifully. During trials, it really did prove itself to be a relatively bulletproof system. There are special FBW maintenance boundaries set–just as SUBSAFE boundaries are set–to ensure the integrity of the system is not compromised.
Having read the replies in this thread, I will say that despite newer doodads and gizmos, it appears absolutely nothing about serving on a submarine has changed.
A fellow Virginia sailor! I’m a plank-owner from the previous USS Virginia CGN 38.
Of course my Virginia wasn’t an insane ship - it didn’t sink on purpose!
I have to ask, though - given your name here on the boards - was it chosen in homage to your boat? (IIRC your Virginia has the same motto as mine did - the State’s motto - Sic Semper Tyrannis.)
I haven’t read the in depth reports of the incident, but the understanding I’d had was that the workers involved were contract workers without the training to fully know the risks they were dealing with. The supervisor who’d pressed them to up output, however, should have been knowledgeble enough to know the risks he was asking them to run.
On the other hand, one reason that civilian workers can’t be trained to the same standards is simply the multiplicity of designs out there. A lot of the training that Navy nucs get is curtailed on theory - i.e. we learn a lot of operational conditions for the relatively few naval plants in operation. Even if, as was my case, I never saw an S5W plant, it had a lot of similarities to all naval plants. AIUI, after I got out of the training pipeline they shifted to the S6G plant, which would have had the same core I was dealing with on my ship, even though it was a surface plant. That kind of incestuous design features show up all over the place.
In contrast civilian power plants are a lot more varied. When I took some courses while in the Navy about civilian nuclear power (And learned something about my limits - dammit I still say that semi-conductor radiation detectors work by PFM!) they were forced to teach CANDU reactors, simply because there was no other single plant that they could teach from a north american standpoint that could be called exemplary.
Of course, what the nuc training program does is produces nuclear qualified technicians. Don’t get me wrong, that’s all that’s necessary to operate a plant. But it leaves gaps in our knowledge that a true nuclear engineering degree holder wouldn’t have. Forex - a nuclear engineer should be able to describe how you’d derive a heat exchanger efficiency equation, and I couldn’t tell you how to do that if my life depended upon it.
The sad fact is that for a number of reasons I tend to think that civilian nuclear power and naval nuclear power are at best only slightly related fields.
Hey, nice to meet you. Two plankowners from two different ships of the same name. Nice ship you had there, BTW. Naturally, we had a poster hanging while in pre-com detailing all the previous vessels named Virginia.
And actually, I was known as Tyrant well before reporting to the boat. The details aren’t really necessary, but it’s been a nickname for some time. :eek:
Yes, our motto was Sic Semper Tyrannis as well. Amusingly, though, when I recieved my welcome aboard package the folder it arrived in–as well as the huge placard hanging in our building in the shipyard–read SIC SEMPER TYRANUS.
You simply cannot expect a bunch of squids to NOT snicker when you hand them anything that says “anus.” Impossible.
Hey Tyrant! Pretty neat description–but the link for the photo doesn’t work.
I mentioned this at the beginning of this thread, but I should repeat that all of my info is based on my service aboard a 688-I boat, as well as riding and/or tours of even older classes of subs. I can’t comment on the newer subs (i.e. the Seawolf and Virginia-class boats). I’ve probably been lax in using the present tense for all of my comments and forgetting that newer classes may be moving away from those tenets we old-timers lived by–the rules that were designed to keep water out of the people tank.
“Pilots” and “co-pilots” on a sub? Fly-by-wire? :dubious: You know, when the first 688-I boats were launched with the BSY-1 system (which integrated much of the electronics), we used to joke that a glitch with the fathometer could knock out the whole sonar suite. Now the ship control system is also electronic? :eek:
Oh well–it works for aircraft, so I guess it’ll work for subs. Of course, military aircraft crash pretty routinely, too. :dubious:
Hmm, it seems navsource.org is being a little flaky.
Here’s an article from Undersea Warfare that includes that photo (albeit way too small to really see anything) and quite a bit more information. And here you’ll find a lot more photos (including the one I attempted linking above.)
I’ve never been on a BSY-1 boat, but all of the foward NPES systems (yes, redundancy) are tightly integrated, too. Everything communicates with everything else, from the SCS to the AN/BQQ-10 to the AN/BYG-1 to photonics. Amazingly, it all works.
Now, of course, there were a few hiccups from time to time, and it can be a maze to troubleshoot.
I would like to throw in that we still held the same tenets sacred that those who came before us did. You know, the whole keeping water out of the people tank thing, as you mentioned.
But, you know. . .from my experience in the service, and my more recent experience as a civilian in the industry–sometimes I wonder how long we’re going to continue putting men on the boats. Quite frankly, I imagine that within 50 years submarines will no longer be manned.
It’s not just the boats that are looking at going unmanned - as long ago as 1997 the Arsenal Ship was first proposed.
And I know I’m not alone in thinking that the Zumwalt class DDs look to have either too much crew for attrition units, or too little crew for operations and damage control. (Don’t get me started on the horror I have about blind voids aboard ships, such as you get by making crew cabins for the whole crew.)
Obviously, C&C is one of the factors limiting the Arsenal ship concept. And I’d think that any control problems for an unmanned surface vessel are going to be magnified greatly dealing with an armed DSROV. Wire controls are problematical, ELF signals require a long time to send any complex message, compared to more conventional radio, AIUI and SONAR signals can be jammed fairly easily. I don’t think it’s going be near as simple as taking a Predator’s C&C suite and transferring it. (Which, obviously, is one reason you’re putting the timeline for the replacement at 50 years, not 10.)
